while he insisted on going another which they declared to be dangerous, as it indeed turned out. After a violent quarrel the guides obtemperated his commands, and the result was that he fell into a crevasse. At this point opinions differ as to what actually ensued. According to some the rope broke; in the opinion of others the offended guides cut it. At all events, the Russian did not emerge alive, though it was proved that the fall did not kill him; and the moral of the story clearly is, to keep on as good terms with guides as possible.

Not to swell this chapter of accidents with minor incidents, as might easily be done, let me say a few words on the catastrophe on the Matterhorn which has caused so much controversy of late. Alpine ascents are regarded by many persons as proceeding from a species of inexplicable infatuation which cannot be too strongly condemned or unsparingly ridiculed; but it is not likely that so many men of superior intelligence and character would take to them, unless these ascents really supplied some want of our nature. We do not find that it is the foolish or the idle, the ignorant or the brutalminded, who return year after year to exercise themselves among the high Alps. Distinguished students and tutors of the English universities, and some of the most promising young men of Germany, Switzerland, and Northern Italy, are, as a rule, the classes of men who share most in this so-called infatuation, and that without aiming at scientific results. To health, mental as well as physical, we cannot dispense with the inhaling of fresh air as with varied corporeal exercise, and these conditions of health can only in rare constitutions be fulfilled as a mere matter of duty without other incitements. By dancing on a treadmill in one's garden, a certain amount of exercise might be gone through every

day; but in how many cases would that exercise prove either exhilarating or invigorating? In order to healthy and invigorating exercise, certain conditions are usually necessary. There must be something to be achieved, something to be seen, something to be learned, and the pleasurable stimulus of rivalry or renown. And to persons in sound bodily health there is no exercise superior, or even equal, to that afforded by Alpine climbing. Pursued with the aid of a heavy ashen staff, it exercises every muscle of the body quite as much as swimming does; it brings the lungs into full play, and habituates the body and limbs to sudden, quick efforts, as well as to prolonged exertion. To attain the perfect balance of body required for difficult glacier and rock work, brings one very near, at least, to the perfection of physical manhood. The nerves are remarkably strengthened by gradual, judicious familiarity with dangerous positions on giddy heights; and the dependence of a party of mountaineers on each other's firmness and trustworthiness, involves a moral education of no small value. Breathing the difficult air of the iced mountain-top, bivouacking in caves, and undergoing the training, or falling into the habits of life necessary to the accomplishment of serious ascents, affords an admirable corrective influence to our luxurious civilisation and the cerebral excitement or paralysis caused by sedentary studious life. Nor can it be truly said that, even when no particular science is pursued, Alpine ascents are barren of intellectual results. Is it nothing that so many of our youth, at a period of life when the mind is most easily impressed, when the passions are strongest and the temptations to voluptuousness the greatest, should take pleasure in a pursuit which eminently requires hardihood and manliness? There is nothing very mysterious in the charm of the

mountains which induces man to rise from the zone of earth friendly to human life, into the inimical snow-desert, where crevasses yawn at his feet to engulf him, avalanches overhang to overwhelm him, and blinding storms sweep round him. Even in the thrilling sense of danger thus often experienced, there is an education in bravery, in self-collectedness, in self-control, and in the power of acting in sudden emergencies, which nothing else but warfare can so fully afford, and which is thus attained without fostering those angry and brutal passions which warfare so naturally evokes. It is a great thing for men of intelligence and education to be brought in contact with nature in her grander and more terrible aspects, not to bow before her with the craven dread of the pagan savage, but with reverence to acknowledge her majesty as a glory in which we, her latest and her noblest born, have a rightful part. The long sweep of the ice-stream, the thunder of the avalanche, the perilous slopes of snow, the gigantic ice-walls dividing a continent, and the pinnacles of rock and ice cleaving the ebon air, have yielded more important lessons than any they have yet given to science. There is much more advantage than need be referred to here in the efforts of many who scale the Alps,

"And, placed on high above the storm's

Cervin was a temptation to efforts which no other mountain in Europe could have excited. It is itself one of the very grandest objects in nature, rising in lonely sublimity from the glaciers at its base, as if a long flame of rock had darted up towards heaven, and, fixed for evermore, been sprinkled with snow and spotted with thin sheets of ice. The ascent of the Matterhorn was really the great achievement which remained among the Alps; and it is no wonder that, season after season, many of the ablest mountaineers circled round it with longing and inquiring eyes. No one had ever trod upon its awful pinnacle except, according to local tradition, the Wandering Jew himself. That personage had thrice stood upon its summit: once when, in some tropical era of the earth, a vineclad city stood there; once when the ruined city had been covered with tangled jungle; and, lastly, when (in our modern time) the cold waves of the glacier had flowed over the terraced vineyards, and the pyramid of rock and ice stood unpolluted by merely human tread.

As the Wandering Jew, however, did not deign to communicate an account of his last ascent to any recognised organ of public opinion, the virgin summit of Monte Silvio, as the Italians call the Matterhorn, became an object of intense desire. In 1860, M. Vaughan Hawkins and Professor Tyndall made a serious attempt on it from Breuil on the Italian side, but were arrested on the ridge between the Matterhorn and the Dent d'Hérens. In 1862, Mr Whymper, who has now succeeded at such great loss, made another unsuccessful effort from the same side, and was followed later in the season by Tyndall, who ascended within a few hundred feet of the summit to a point where he was arrested by perpendicular faces of rock. There appeared in the papers a few days ago a statement to the effect that, since the accident to Mr Whymper's par

It was well for poor Lendrick that he was not to witness the great change which, in a few short weeks, had been effected in his once home. So complete, indeed, was the transformation, there was but very little left beyond the natural outline of the scenery to remind one of that lovely nook in which the tasteful cottage nestled. The conservatory had been converted into a diningroom; the former dinner-room being fitted up for a billiard-room. The Swiss cow-house, a pretty little conceit, on which Lendrick had lavished some money and more time, was turned into a stable, with three loose-boxes; and the neat lawn, whose velvet sward was scarce less beautiful than the glittering flowerbeds that studded it, was ruthlessly cut up into a racecourse, with hurdles and fences and double ditches, to represent a stiff country, and offer all the features of a steeple-chase.

It needed not the assurance of Mr Kimball, the house-agent, to proclaim that his client was very unlike the last occupant of the place. "He was no recluse, no wretched misanthropist, hiding his discontent amongst shrubs and forcing-beds; he was a man of taste and refinement, with knowledge of life and its requirements. would be an acquisition to any neighbourhood."

He

Now, the last phrase-and he invariably made it his perorationhas a very wide and sweeping acceptation. It appeals to the neighbourhood with all the charms that pertain to social intercourse; a guest the more and a host the more are no small claims in small places. It appeals to the Parson, as another fountain from which to draw draughts of benevolence. To the

Doctor it whispers fees and familiar dinners. Galen knows that the luckiest of men are not exempt from human ills, and that gout comes as a frequent guest where the cook is good and the wine tempting; and the Butcher himself revels in the thought of a "good family" that consumes sirloins and forestalls sweetbreads.

It was somewhat trying to young Tom Lendrick, who had gone down to the Nest to fetch away some remnants of fishing-tackle he had left there, to hear these glowing anticipations of the new-comer, so evidently placed in contrast with the quiet and inexpensive life his father had led. How unlike were his father, and this "acquisition to any neighbourhood," was impressed upon him at any moment! How could a life of unobtrusive kindness, of those daily ministerings to poor men's wants, compete with the glitter and display which were to adorn a neighbourhood?

Already were people beginning to talk of Lendrick as odd, eccentric, peculiar; to set down his finest qualities as strange traits of a strange temperament, and rather, on the whole, to give themselves credit for the patience and forbearance which they had shown to one who, after all, was "simply an egotist."

Yes, such are not unfrequent judgments in this same world of ours; and if you would have men's suffrages for the good you do, take care that you do it conventionally. Be in all things like those around you; and if there be a great man in your vicinity, whenever a doubt arises in your mind as to any course of action, do as you may imagine he might do.