leaning against the mantelpiece, with his eyes fixed on the door. There was a flutter at his heart somehow, but he did not feel that he was afraid. And they could hear Willis fumbling over the door, and an impatient voice outside. Whatever it was, it was very urgent, and Jack, growing anxious in spite of himself, would have gone to see. But again his father called him back. Something chill and terrible was stealing over Mr Brownlow; he was growing pale-he was hoarse when he spoke. But he neither moved, nor would he let his son move, and stood propping himself up, with a livid countenance, and gazing at the door.

When it opened they all started, and Mr Brownlow himself gave a hoarse cry. It was not a telegram, nor was it a stranger. It was a figure they were well used to see, and with which they had no tragic associations. She came in like a ghost, black, pale, and swift, in a passion of eagerness, with a large old silver watch in her hand. "I am not too late," she said, with a gasp, and held it up close to Mr Brownlow's face. And then she stood still and looked at him, and he knew it all if she had not said another word. It was Pamela's mother, the woman whom, two days before, he had helped into the carrier's cart at his own gate.

WHEN I last left off we had reached Berchtesgaden, and I was talking about the klamms, or those chasms in the mountains which are narrower than the valleys. If you are up to thirty-eight miles, varied by an ascent and descent of some two or three thousand feet, which has to be repeated on return, you may make for the Seissenberg Klamm," der Koenigin aller Klamme," Queen of all the Klamms, as the German guide-book calls it. To go through it gives impressions not to be easily effaced. Scott gives perhaps the most lively idea to be found in our language of a torrent far down among rocks, when he says,

"Deep, deep down, and far within,

Toils with the rock the roaring linn." But here you go yourself deep, deep down into the chambers of the rock, and become the close companion of the furious stream. You owe this privilege to the considerate attentiveness of the Austrian Government, which has run galleries and wooden stairs along the edges of the cataracts, with bridges across here and there. Along these you walk in complete

safety, yet, unless you be of very stolid mood, not without a certain mysterious thrill akin to fear, as the eternal roar half deafens you, and the black rocks, all but closing overhead, shroud you in a darkness all too powerfully relieved by the white torrent at your feet. Here is a geological phenomenon with no mystery about it. Whatever disputes may be elsewhere about upheavals and depressions, the klamm has been cut by the stream. You can see, by the cups and basins it has left clean cut into the marble rock, that the water has fairly eaten its way through. In how long time? If some one had recorded the level of the surface in the days of Julius Cæsar, the inscription might have been of some service to modern geologists. Since it has been lately on the cards to do something for posterity, might we not leave them some such records here and there as a future testimony of the rocks? It would be a cheaper way of doing our duty than the saving up of coals, in order that the hearthstones of our descendants five hundred years hence may be gladdened.

How long the visitor will abide within the black shadows of the klamm will be a question depending on taste and nerve. Such a scene gives a passing sensation rather than a continuous enjoyment. You go through it and have done. You do not gaze lingeringly on it as on the snows and peaks of the neighbouring Watzman, or the blue waters of the Achen See.

The scenery on the way between Berchtesgaden and the klamm is a continued enjoyment both in going and returning. You pass two small lakes, the Hinter Sees, which are a variety from the Koenig and the Achen See. Surrounded are they by peaks and snows, which they reflect from their gentle bosoms, but they lie in soft meadows, and are edged by flowers and birches. In this walk you cross a great frontier. Berchtesgaden is in Bavaria; the klamm is in Austria. The division is at the watersheer, and there stands the customhouse. It is like a joke to see a goverment office, with its doubleheaded eagle and other insignia of imperial royalty, in so wild a spot; but there are people who remember our own coast-guard barracks on the stormy headlands of Caithness. As I passed I found the chief officer standing at the door, with an almost hospitable expression on his face, as if he were glad to see some one from the world nearer the level of the sea than his own. If there was a day when, at such a place, there was trouble to the British stranger about passports or the like, it is over now. Yet a few soldiers or armed custom - house officers lounged about in a listless sort of way. They were very civil; without their aid I would have missed the entrance to the klamm, which is across fields in which one would not expect to find anything marvellous. If grand scenery be so dear to the Austrian custom-house officer as to weigh against salary, rank, and other con

siderations in the estimate of his position, these men must be considered peculiarly happy and fortunate. They were not demonstrative of excessive felicity, however, but on the whole rather demure. They told me that the station was very cold in winter-a statement which I had no doubt was perfectly true.

The district around this centre bears marks of fearful scourging from avalanches. The avalanche, like the pauper, may be divided into the regular and the casual. The one class has its fixed grooves, in which it rolls year after year, probably keeping a pretty accurate average of time, according to the seasons. There are places where it may be seen all spring and summer when the sun approaches its noon height. A favourite stage for witnessing the performance used to be the Wengern Alp, right against the Jungfrau, and I suppose it is still frequented with that view. You saw through the clear air a handful, as it were, of white dust drop down the precipice, making a hollow echoing roar that told you it was a mass of many tons in weight. These avalanches are of course in the general case harmless. Their place is made by them and for them. It is when man has miscalculated his safety, and from some peculiarity in the season, or the hidden working of the elements, the snow breaks the boundaries assigned to it by its neighbours, that devastation has come. One may sometimes see a scaur left so near to a châlet, that it must have made palpitating hearts. The course taken by some recent fall of more than usual extent is an awful scene; and if awful in its dead repose, what must the scene have been during the tragedy? Something, one would suppose, fit to inspire the painter of a grand picture of "the day of His wrath." There lie strewn like dust the marble rocks which it has picked up on its way, and has pelted against

bridges and barricades, crushing them like nutshells. High up in the lap of the mountain you see the snows which, overcharged, have thus vented their impatience, and you don't like to be too near to the precipitous slope, over the edge of which the white lips seem still to threaten mischief.

The scenery here, savage as it is, has fine, warm, sunny straths on either side. At the klamm you have descended far from the wild upland, and at the lower reach you can see, as through a spyglass, the pleasant valley on the Austrian side. Here a very gay vision somewhat startled me by its evidence of neighbouring civilisation. Just where the stream threw itself forth in its last cataract from the black mouth of the klamm, and where the sunshine fell on it again, it also fell on a group of Austrian young ladies, in all manner of gaudy colours, bending like a rainbow over the white foam. The vision reminded me of a story how an adventurous German traveller, having passed eastward through Mongolia and Tibet, found himself getting deeper and deeper into Orientalism, and farther from every reminiscence of Europe, when all at once he found himself in the presence of a bevy of English ladies, with pink parasols, picnicking and chatting under the shadow of a pagoda, as assured and easy as if they were on the banks of Thames. He had penetrated to a far-up station of our Indian empire.

The walk to this klamm led me for some miles over a familiar road, on which I had studied the scenery on the haughs of the rivers. This scenery, when you get beyond the rye and tobacco fields, has a remarkable beauty of its own. The grass is close and clean and bright, as close as it is on the lawn of an English mansion, and unmarked by any cutting instrument. The usual forest that girdles the mountains is pine, but here the verdure

is infinitely and beautifully diversified: pine here and there, but mixed with it ash, elm, and the weeping-birch, as beautiful and as sad in its beauty as it is at Abergeldie. The whole undulates in little risings and depressions with a gracefulness which no landscapegardener ever approached. One would say that the idea of English park scenery must have been taken from such a model; and certainly it is in these examples that it should be studied.

By the way, we are now in the midst of the scenery worthily described by Campbell in those fine lines of his, " On Leaving a Scene in Bavaria." People said, when he published them late in life, that he had renewed his youth and all its vigour; but they had been written many years before their publication, and, from some ill-justified diffidence, he had withheld them from the press. There is in them an irregularity and want of system, but a power that is felt to deepen as you think over the piece in the midst of its own scenery :"Yes, I have loved thy wild abode,

Unknown, unploughed, untrodden
shore,

Where scarce the woodman finds a road,
And scarce the fisher plies an oar;
For man's neglect I love thee more,

That art nor avarice intrude
To tame thy torrent's thunder-shock,
Or prune thy vintage of the rock,
Magnificently rude.

Unheeded spreads thy blossomed bud
Its milky bosom to the bee;
Unheeded falls along the flood
Thy desolate and aged tree.
Forsaken scene! how like to thee

The fate of unbefriended worth!
Like thine her fruit unhonoured falls-
Like thee in solitude she calls

A thousand treasures forth."

And again, after describing the shadows, clouds, and swollen tor

rents of autumn :

"But not the storm, dethroning fast

Yon monarch oak of massy pile,
Nor river roaring to the blast

Around its dark and desert isle,
Nor church-bell tolling to beguile
The cloud-born thunder sailing by,
Can sound in discord to my soul.
Roll on, ye mighty waters, roll!
And rage, thou darkening sky!"

The bell ringing as the companion of the thunderstorm is a permanent institution here. I could not make out whether it was supposed to have a physical influence on the electricity or to have a propitiatory effect in a religious sense calculated to exempt the district from a calamity. Opposite to Jembach, on a spur of the mountain rising right over the river Inn, there is a sort of hermitage or chapel. It is the duty of a recluse who has charge of it to be on the look-out for thunderstorms, and begin the bell-ringing; and he is well posted for the accomplishment of his duty. A solemn strange duty it must be to act as sentinel against the approach of such a foe. I happened once to witness the ceremonial of ringing-out the thunder in a very picturesque shape. I was coming out of the great gorge behind the Martins wand. The first thing that drew attention was a rushing mighty wind, which caught up the marble powder lying on the hillside, and drifted it about like a dry sandy mist. Then came as sudden a lull, and the church-bell of Zirl right under my feet began "tolling slow with sullen roar." The chime was taken up by the dozen or so other churches in the valley, mellowed in the distance until it "passed in music out of sight." Meantime the setting sun illuminated a great stormcloud, making it a flame-coloured red that spread over half the horizon, as if the world were on fire. Over this passed every now and then a tongue or sheet of white lightning. The whole affair was so far off that of the thunder only a slight muttering was heard. The church-bells appeared to do their duty effectively, for the storm did not reach the district round Martinswand; but what of the efficiency of the bells in the place where it was at actual work?

The people of these districts are very religious-some would call them fanatical, others superstitious.

The zeal that burns within them is an extremely mild flame, so far as it can affect others who either care for none of these things, or are heated by fire of a different character. The churches are marvellously abundant. In some places almost at the end of every mile the taper finger points to heaven.

It is clear that, even were all the inhabitants of a valley simultaneously to flock to its several churches, they would not be filled. But though they are not like our Dissenting meeting-houses, thronged at special times, they are scarcely ever entirely empty. There the humblest peasant may enjoy magnificence and art; for although none of the world's greatest paintings may be hung in any Tyrolese church, there is a wonderful amount of tolerably good painting in all of them, and the tendency is ever towards the high ideal. When I see two or three aged, frail, afflictedlooking creatures on their knees in such a place, I am apt to agree with Wordsworth that we should not deride the fane "where patient sufferers bend in trust, to win a happier hour;" and since there is to be no truer light for the poor deluded creatures, I think it is better that they should have consolation even in this form than in none. You may see occasionally mere children from eight to ten years old step from their playground into the church by a voluntary impulse, undirected by any senior. And when I have seen the creatures kneeling and turning their serious little faces to some picture of the Virgin Mother, as she sits "smiling babe in arms," I fear I could not summon up the thoughts legitimate to the occasion about the beast and the scarlet woman, or denounce with sufficient indignation the horrible sin of training the infant mind to idolatry and the service of Satan.

Outside the churches are pretty buildings. The spire springs from a slim tower, the two being united

in a gradual unabrupt junction so difficult of accomplishment in more ambitious buildings-a junction as if the one grew out of the other. Inside their magnificence is marvellous, when we consider the scanty population and the smallness of the product that would come were we to divide the number of the people by the number of the churches. Ecclesiastics, secular and regular, of all forms and hues, swarm over the country, and are all, down to the barefooted friar, treated with veneration. The topic of toleration, and the extension to heretics of the right to hold property in the Tyrol, was, when I was there, before the Austrian Reichsrath. I was told that the passing of the measure would be of no avail. Local influence never could be held by heretics. Nearly all the landed property was in the hands of ecclesiastical bodies, who would never so far forget what was due to the Church as to treat with heretics; and as to the small amount of property in the hands of laymen, the Church was strong enough to protect that from desecration too.

Yet with all the zeal of the people and the intolerance of the institutions, there is not perhaps a spot on the surface of the earth where the stranger is less under the pressure of religion. The Protestant sees it everywhere, sees it the more distinctly and emphatically from its entire difference from all that he is accustomed to, but he feels it nowhere. I am certain that any Romanist foreigner in this country would feel personal pressure and disconformity with his habits fifty times as much as a Protestant feels the same thing among the mountaineers here. The people seem to feel that it is enough to have the monopoly of the next world, and that with that great prize secure, the poor heretic should be made as comfortable in this world as he can be made. This is something rather different from the old doctrine, that true humanity consisted in burning

his vile body in this world, as an atonement which would save his soul from the eternal fires in the next. The Tyrolese may not be so grand a doctrine, but it is more comfortable on the whole, and the heretic will readily compound for it, abandoning all the eternal advantages which are to be purchased by a roasting in the present. With a scrupulous attention to the complex and conspicuous observances of their own religion, it is curious to see how unconscious they seem to be whether the stranger participates in them or not, whether he may not even treat them with actual disrespect. If a procession passes, or a reliquary or the viaticum is carried through the streets, the people are all too fervently absorbed in kneeling and adoration to observe the stolid or perhaps the scornful air of the wondering stranger.

There is a wonderful amount of kindliness and civility among the people of these regions, and however much of a stoic one may resolve to be when on the tramp, these are things that make life all the pleasanter a thousand miles from home. And the kindliness is the more to be esteemed that it is not of the mercenary kind one finds in other parts of the world. I don't say that the Tyrolese landlord does not expect payment of his bill, or that the people who serve you in all ways do not expect fair remuneration for their services to you. But you are not pestered to accept services you don't want, as in other places. In the whole course of my experience in these districts, I never once was harassed by any one offering to be my guide, or making any of the countless proffers of service, all to be exorbitantly paid for, which haunt one from morning to night in the Oberland of Switzerland, and make life there such a burden that one hardly remembers whether the scenery is fine or poor. I remember an exception signally