money before the king, so that the whole gallery creaked and cracked. The king thanked him, and put a good face on it, and promised him good pay and a safe pass home if he cared to have it; but all Grumblegizzard wanted was more work. "What shall I do now?" he asked. Well, when the king had thought about it, he said he had better travel to the Hill Troll, who had carried off his grandfather's sword, to that castle he had by the lake, whither no one dared to go. So Grumblegizzard got several loads of food into his big scrip, and set off again; and he fared both far and long, over wood and fell, and wild wastes, till he came to some high hills, where the Troll was said to dwell, who had taken the king's grandfather's sword. But the Troll was not to be seen under bare sky, and the hill was fast shut, so that even Grumblegizzard was not man enough to get in. So he joined fellowship with some quarrymen, who were living at a hill farm, and who lay up there quarrying stone in those hills. Such help they had never yet had, for he beat and battered the fell till the rocks were rent, and great stones were rolled down as big as houses; but when he was to rest at noon, and take out one load of food, the whole scrip was clean eaten out. "I'm a pretty good trencherman myself," said Grumblegizzard; "but whoever has been here, has a sharper tooth, for he has eaten up bones and all." That was how things went the first day, and it was no better the next. The third day he set off to quarry stones again, and took with him the third meal of food; but he laid down behind it, and shammed sleep. Just then there came out of the hill a Troll with seven heads, and began to munch and eat his food. "Now the board is laid, and I will eat," said the Troll. "That we'll have a tussle for," said Grumblegizzard; and gave him a blow with his club, and knocked off all his seven heads at once. So he went into the hill, out of which the Troll had come, and in there stood a horse, which ate out of a tub of glowing coals, and at its heels stood a tub of oats. "Why don't you eat out of the tub of oats?" said Grumblegizzard. "Because I am not able to turn round," said the horse. "I'll soon turn you," said he. "Rather strike off my head," said the horse. So he struck it off, and then the horse was turned into a handsome man. He said he had been taken into the hill by the Troll, and turned into a horse, and then he helped him to find the sword, which the Troll had hidden at the bottom of his bed, and upon the bed lay the Troll's old mother, asleep and snoring. Home again they went by water, and when they had got well out, the old witch came after them; as she could not catch them, she fell to drinking the lake dry, and she drank and drank, till the water in the lake fell; but she could not drink the sea dry, and so she burst. When they came to shore, Grumblegizzard sent a message to the king, to come and fetch his sword. He sent four horses. No! they could not stir it; he sent eight, and he sent twelve; but the sword stayed where it was, they could not move it an inch. But Grumblegizzard took it up alone, and bore it along. The king could not believe his eyes, when he saw Grumblegizzard again; but he put a good face on it, and promised him gold, and green woods; and when Grumblegizzard wanted more work, he said he had better set off for a haunted castle he had, where no one dared to be, and there he must sleep till he had built a bridge over the Sound, so that folk could pass over. If he were good to do that he would pay him well; nay, he would be glad to give him his daughter to wife. "Yes! yes! I am good to do that," said Grumblegizzard. No man had ever left that castle alive; those who reached it lay there slain and torn to bits, and the king thought he should never see him more, if he only got him to go thither. But Grumblegizzard set off; and he took with him his scrip of food, a very tough and twisted stump of a fir-tree, an axe, a wedge, and a few matches, and besides, he took the workhouse boy from the king's grange. When they got to the sound, the river ran full of ice, and was as headlong as a force; but he stuck his legs fast at the bottom, and waded on, till he got over at last. When he had lighted a fire, and warmed himself, and got a bit of food, he tried to sleep; but it was not long before there was such a noise and din, as though the whole castle was turned topsy-turvey. The door blew back against the wall, and he saw nothing but a gaping jaw, from the threshold up to the lintel. "There, you have a bit, taste that!" said Grumblegizzard, as he threw the workhouse boy into the gaping maw. "Now let me see you, what kind you are. May be we are old friends." So it was, for it was Old Nick, who was outside. Then they took to playing cards, for the Old One wanted to try and win back some of the land-tax, which Grumblegizzard had squeezed out of his mother, when he went to ask it for the king; but whichever way they cut the cards, Grumblegizzard won, for he put a cross on all the court cards, and when he had won all his ready money, Old Nick was forced to give Grumblegizzard some of the gold and silver that was in the castle. Just as they were hard at it the fire went out, so that they could not tell one card from another. "Now we must chop wood," said Grumblegizzard, and with that he drove his axe into the fir stump, and thrust the wedge in; but the gnarled root was tough, and would not split at once, however much he twisted and turned his axe. "They say you are very strong," he said, to Old Nick; "spit in your fists and bear a hand with your claws, and rive and rend, and let me see the stuff you are made of." Old Nick did so, and put both his fists into the split, and strove to rend it with might and main, but, at the same time, Grumblegizzard struck the wedge out, and Old Nick was caught in a trap; and then Grumblegizzard tried his back with his axe. Old Nick begged and prayed so prettily to be let go, but Grumblegizzard was hard of hearing on that side till he gave his word never to come there again, and make a noise. And so, too, he had to promise to build a bridge over the Sound, so that folks could pass over it at all times of the year, and it was to be ready when the ice was gone. "This is a hard bargain,” said Old Nick. But there was no help for it, if he wished to get out. He had to give his word; only, he bargained, he was to have the first soul that passed over the bridge. That was to be the Sound due. "That he should have," said Grumblegizzard. So he got loose, and went home; but Grumblegizzard lay down to sleep, and slept till far on next day. So, when the king came to see if he was hacked to pieces, or torn to bits, he had to wade through heaps of money before he could get to the bed. It lay in piles and sacks high up the wall but Grumblegizzard lay in the bed asleep and snoring. "God help both me and my daughter," said the king, when he saw that Grumblegizzard was alive and rich. Yes, all was good and well done; there was no gainsaying that. But it was not worth while talking of the wedding till the bridge was ready. So, one day, the bridge stood ready, and Old Nick stood on it to take the toll he had bargained for. Now Grumblegizzard wanted to take the king with him to try the bridge, but he had no mind to do that. So he got up himself on a horse, and threw the fat milkmaid from the king's grange upon the pommel before him ; -she looked for all the world like a big firstump-and then he rode over till the bridge thundered under him. "Where is the Sound due? Where have you put the soul?" screamed Old Nick. "It sits inside this stump. If you want it, spit in your fists and take it," said Grumblegizzard. "Nay, nay! many thanks," said Old Nick. "If she doesn't take me, I'll not take her. You caught me once, and you shan't catch me again in a cleft stick;" and, with that, he flew off straight home to his old mother; and, since then, he has never been seen or heard in those parts. But Grumblegizzard went home to the king's grange, and wanted the wages the king had promised him; and when the king tried to wriggle out of it, and would not keep his word, Grumblegizzard said he had better pack up a good scrip of food, for he was going to take his wages himself. Yes, the king did that: and, when all was ready, Grumblegizzard took the king out before the door, and gave him a good push and sent him flying up into the air. As for the scrip, he threw it after him, that he might have something to eat. And, if he hasn't come down again, there he is still hanging, with his scrip, between Heaven and Earth, to this very day that now is. IT AFTER CHAMOIS. T was in the month of October, 1867, that I found myself, with Charley Winter at the table-d'hôte of the Grimsel Inn. The mention of a successful day's shooting inspired Charley with the brilliant idea that, we, too, might stalk chamois on the crags of the Finster-Aarhorn and the glaciers of the Aar, if only we could find a local Nimrod to act as our guide. Fortune favoured us; for on consulting the landlord, we were informed that Carl Perren, a hunter of great renown, was at that moment in the inn, laying in a dictum appeared to be based on rather slight grounds, certainly; but we thought of the novels of Mr. Fenimore Cooper, and implicitly believed in the venery of our guide. And the events justified our faith. Stealing cautiously up to a projecting headland of the mountain, we succeeded in reaching a crag which com stock of provisions for three days' shooting; and that very possibly, if we could satisfy him of our mountaineering capabilities, that illustrious man would consent, on our paying a sufficiently high price to compensate him for spoiling his sport, to allow us to accompany him. The plan was attractive. Mountaineering, pur et simple, is pleasant enough, though some-manded a full view of the Grindelwald side of what tedious on paper; but a combination of mountaineering and deer-stalking seemed the perfection of wild sport. Preliminaries were soon arranged with Perren; and as the Préfet of the district happened to be staying at our inn, and was willing to obtain an unexpected fee by granting us a permis de chasse, a start at two o'clock next morning was decided upon. It was still bright moonlight when Charley and I took our headers in the Grimsel Lake; and the intense cold of the water produced a reactionary warmth which Dr. Gully would be glad to import for the benefit of his hydropathists at Malvern. Then, while we saw the great white stars sink one by one, we set out towards the western base of the Galenstock, at first groping our way among the boulders, and reaching the snow just as the pink glow on the mountain tops gave place to the golden light of morning. Thenceforward, for about an hour, our steps sunk through the thin upper drift and down to a substratum of red snow, which made each footmark appear to be marked with blood, and left a long succession of crimson dots in our track. According to Perren's plan, we were to draw the alp which rises from the north-west side of the Rhone glacier, and then to make our way towards the Thierberg, the very name of which smacked of sport, taking up our quarters for the night under the softest rock that could be found in the neighbourhood of the Aar glacier. Our way was not easy. When Mr. Ruskin described an alp as his beau idéal of Paradise, he possibly remembered its difficulties of access. But we plodded steadily on, and presently scrambled up a cleft which frequent avalanches of snow and rocks had worn into a tolerably slippery path. At the top of this our leader suddenly halted, and began a series of gesticulations expressive of some tremendous emotion which language was unequal to depict. Discreetly keeping silence, we climbed up to him, and were made acquainted with the cause of his excitement. At right angles to our track, on the snow, appeared a series of little indentations, so shallow as to be scarcely perceptible, but which Perren confidently pronounced to be slots of four chamois that had passed within the last hour. This precise the alp; and though our unexperienced eyes failed to discover any living object in the wide expanse of rock and snow, and even Perren himself at first pronounced that the chamois must have crossed the ridge, a sweeping search with his telescope among some loose rocks made him ask for the loan of Charley's more powerful field-glass. This enabled him to descry four chamois quietly lying among some clusters of alpine rhododendra about a mile and a half from our point of observation; but how to get within range was a problem of no little difficulty. We might descend at once, but then we should probably have the pleasure of seeing the chamois go out of the gorge at one end as we entered it at the other; we might cross by the head of the glacier and take up our position near the only other patch of vegetation in the neighbourhood, on the slight chance of their moving their quarters thither; or one of us might make his way, albeit with some difficulty, to the farther end of the defile, while the others remained en cache. Grave questions are always best discussed by Englishmen with an accompaniment of eating and drinking; so we decided to settle our plan of operations while enjoying the creature-comforts, from the weight of which our porters were only too glad to relieve their backs. Unfortunately, the lunch was doomed to spoil our sport. Perren's rifle, like all the regulation rifles of the Swiss militia, had a hair trigger, but this trigger was set, not by the usual guard, but by a catch at the side of the stock. As we sat at breakfast, then, Charley and Perren were examining each other's guns, and Charley must have unconsciously moved the catch of Perren's piece, so that when, pointing it towards some marmots at play hard by, he happened to touch the hair trigger, a report which evoked countless echoes from all the neighbouring heights was the instantaneous result. A rather acrimonious dispute followed; for our chamois hunter was not restrained by any considerations of relative position from lavishing a very full torrent of abuse upon the spoiler of his sport; but eventually, after watching the herd, consisting of three old chamois and a fawn, as they scampered away over the glacier, we all agreed must have been by the special intervention of one of those cherubs that used to look after the as to the philosophy of accepting the situation. Two or three favourite haunts of the chamois lay between us and the cave where we pro-life of poor Jack, but now bestow their care on posed to take up our quarters for the night; but during the whole of our march for the next six hours, we saw no game whatever, unless a particularly fat marmot who sat on a stone in the sun, and whistled at us so derisively that we felt it our duty to bag him, may be dignified with that name. We tried to eat him for supper; but failed utterly, so ancient and fish-like was his flavour. It was about sunset when we crept through the small orifice of the cave at the base of the Roth-horn; and as the freezing night wind rushed over the waste of glacier and snow that surrounded us, we were not sorry to have the doorway built up with rocks and stones by our porters. Those unlucky men were obliged to pass the night in the situation which the French romantically characterise as à la belle étoile; but in which, after the first half-hour, one generally thinks less of the romance of the thing than of the chance of one's toes being permanently frost-bitten. Even we three, who were at as close quarters as twelve Mr. Bantings in a twopenny omnibus, were by no means too warm; and the cold, combined with a dull sensation of having all the sharp bones of one's neighbour perpetually stuck into all the sensitive parts of one's body, made sleeping a difficulty. But at last a faint solo arose from the nasal organ of Perren; this was soon converted into a duet by Charley's boisterous performance on a similar instrument; and finally, by the emission of certain musical snores, which I regret that I was unable, more Hibernico, to stay awake to hear, I doubt not that I joined with my bed-fellows in producing a most harmonious trio. But our babe-in-the-wood slumbers were more than once broken by the dull roar of the avalanches which rushed down the side of the Roth-horn, and at two o'clock A.M., when our porters aroused us by singing their eternal Herz, mein Herz, we could scarcely have had more than two or three hours' sleep a-piece. This " course of sweet sounds" quickly "moved" us, and in two minutes we were unbuilt, and had made our toilet, which last operation consisted simply in shaking ourselves, and so getting rid of the sharp pebbles which indented our backs. If there be sermons in stones, they certainly make a deep impression in a literal sense. con About three o'clock, with the glimmer of the stars and the faint sheen of the moon to light our way, we began to scramble down the loose rocks which lay round our sleeping-hole; and it mountaineers, that we succeeded, with no worse damage than sundry bruises and scratches, in reaching the place where the glacier and the rock joined each other. That is, where they did not join, for the ice had melted away from the heat-refracting granite, leaving a hiatus valde deflendus, in the shape of a chasm, about fifty feet wide, which arrested our progress. We walked cautiously along the brink, and the dull thud of a falling stone gave us some notion of the depth of the cleft. At last Perren found what he was pleased to call a bridge, of which you will have some idea if you fancy you have to walk along the top of a Gothic roof, with the two sides running up to a knife-edge, like the top of the letter A. First went Perren, chipping off the upper edge of ice with his axe, and so making the path wide enough to afford firm foothold; then Charley and I followed, having given up our rifles to the porters, and resumed our iceaxes; finally came the porters, who crossed with the ease which habit induces, in spite of their heavy loads. Of course, in such a case, the danger is purely imaginary. You would have no difficulty in walking on a track of a foot wide, marked out on the pavement, in Bond Street; and if that strip of pavement were elevated a couple of hundred feet, you would have just the same real foothold. Recognise this fact, subduing your fancy, and you are safe. Once on the glacier, we were all attached to the same rope, and were not long in reaching the snow-slopes on the opposite side. With these our real work began. They seemed of boundless extent; and, as Perren feared that any delay would involve us in some danger from the avalanches, which the mid-day sun generally brings down, he led the way straight up, instead of adopting the usual zig-zag mode of ascent. A clinometer gave the angle of one of these slopes as forty-eight degrees, and we looked down, wondering how we had got up, not daring to speculate as to how we should get down again. Still we mounted as persistently as the hero of the banner with the strange device (why on earth did he choose night-time for his mountaineering?); but still no signs of game appeared. Finally, as we were so far up the mountain that it seemed a pity not to go to the top, we left our rifles in charge of our porters, and proceeded to climb the last arête of the Finster-Aarhorn, which has been defined, with tolerable accuracy, as “an disappointment was in store; for, by comparing our two principal articles of diet, the conclusion was forced upon us that if the wine of the Grimsel Inn were as old as the eggs, it would have a much better reputation. However, we had our tough bread and tougher meat to fall back upon; so we were not absolutely starved. About nine o'clock we lay down to rest, and though the boulder, under which we deposited ourselves, was on the side of a hill, so that it was difficult to avoid sliding down, we managed to obtain a good deal more sleep than on the previous night. indefinitely narrow ridge, with a perpendicular precipice of infinite depth on one side, and a steeper and deeper one on the other." As we mounted, clinging by hands, feet, and eyelids, now swinging round a corner which projected over the Aar glacier, four thousand feet below, now walking cautiously, à la Blondin, over a narrow strip of rock, the breeze grew colder and colder, and wild gusts whirled the white snow-spray round our feet. But the rope afforded us perfect security by the following slow but sure process. A. went forward, while B. and C. held tight; then A. stood still till B. came up to him, and so on. And the judicious use of the rope really takes mountaineering out of the rank of unjustifiably dangerous amusements, and places it on a level (meta-❘ be a favourite haunt of chamois, and his sharp phorically speaking) with hunting and shooting, in this respect. From the summit, a sharp crag more than fourteen thousand feet high, the sea of cloud that was eddying and drifting round afforded as wild a prospect as can well be imagined. But the biting cold, which I felt all the more from having had my hat whirled off by the wind, | and deposited in some crevasse in the glacier (where, I doubt not, it will be discovered in the course of years, and be brought forward by savans after their invariable mode of dealing with any rag found on the ice-as an incontestable proof of something or other connected with glacial motion), soon obliged us to commence our descent, and in about an hour we reached the snow-slopes. Here we started a sitting glissade, or train, all the party sitting in a row, each man taking across his knees the feet of his neighbour behind, and then sliding down the snow at a prodigious rate, to the obvious detriment of the article of clothing most affected. It is a most exhilarating as well as a very fast mode of progression, though I can scarcely recommend it to very nervous ladies. But once down on the lower snowfields, the greatest caution was indispensable; and each of the party was in turn hidden from the others as the frail snow-bridges yielded under his weight, and induced the queer sensation (albeit the rope affords absolute security) of finding oneself dangling over a crevasse having no apparent bottom, but of which the blue walls run sheer downwards, till they end in darkness. Heartily tired, we were not sorry to find that our porters had discovered a tolerably sheltered nook for our second night's bivouac; nor was the sight of their knapsacks of provisions one with which we were disposed to be fastidiously discontented. But a terrible At daybreak, Perren led the way towards a sort of steppe which, as being the highest limit of vegetation in the neighbourhood, he knew to eyes soon detected a slot, in the snow, of evidently recent impression. Shaping our course to leeward of the steppe, we made our way up to a cluster of dwarf rhododendrons (Alpen-rosen) overlying some rocks which concealed us effectually from the lower plateau beyond; and no sooner did our heads appear at the top of the barrier than two fine chamois sprang out, and bounded, with mighty leaps, towards the glacier. Perren and I fired at the nearest, which fell dead instantaneously. (We only found one bullet-hole in him, by the way, so some people might doubt whether it was I who killed him, as Perren politely affirmed.) The other chamois, whose fleet career was evidently checked by Charley's ball, laboured heavily down the snow-slope. But a bergschrund of rather considerable width proved fatal to the poor beast. We saw him plainly as he attempted to spring across it; but too much of his strength had ebbed away with his blood. Scarcely reaching the opposite bank with his forefeet, he fell backwards heavily, and disappeared in the ice. How we were driven to our wits' end to secure our game; how our porters struck for more pay when they found that the chamois weighed considerably more than the eatables we had consumed; how Charley bragged about his lucky shot in every variety of phrase; how, when we were nearly tired out, Perren persisted in telling us at intervals that another halb stunde would bring us to the end of our journey, forcing on us the conviction that that measure of distance must correspond to the indefinite Scotch "bittock;" how we lost our way, and found it again; and lastly, how, six weeks afterwards, in a remote part of Switzerland, I was told a marvellous tale about two English gentlemen who had spent a week among the glaciers, had ascended several |