some men engaged in building a stone house; so the
Schwarenbach was soon to have a rival. We bought
a bottle or so of beer here; at any rate they called
it beer, but I knew by the price that it was dissolved
jewelry, and I perceived by the taste that dissolved
jewelry is not good stuff to drink.

We were surrounded by a hideous desolation.
We stepped forward to a sort of jumping-off place,
and were confronted by a startling contrast: we
seemed to look down into fairyland. Two or three
thousand feet below us was a bright green level, with
a pretty town in its midst, and a silvery stream wind-
ing among the meadows; the charming spot was
walled in on all sides by gigantic precipices clothed
with pines; and over the pines, out of the softened
distances, rose the snowy domes and peaks of the
Monte Rosa region. How exquisitely green and
beautiful that little valley down there was! The dis-
tance was not great enough to obliterate details, it
only made them little, and mellow, and dainty, like
landscapes and towns seen through the wrong end
of a spy-glass.

Right under us a narrow ledge rose up out of the
valley, with a green, slanting, bench-shaped top,
and grouped about upon this green-baize bench were
a lot of black and white sheep which looked merely
like oversized worms. The bench seemed lifted well
up into our neighborhood, but that was a deception
--it was a long way down to it.

We began our descent, now, by the most remark-
able road I have ever seen. It wound in corkscrew
curves down the face of the colossal precipice--a

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