a farm-house a mile in advance on the road, and they pressed on their horses to reach its shelter. In spite of fast riding, floods of rain and flashes of lightning overtook them; Fan's skirts were drenched, and the wind buffeted her little hat, and tugged at her hair till it streamed in fluttering ringlets round her wet and rose-red face.

The haven was reached at last, a neat farm-house with a gable overgrown with climbing flowers. Captain Rupert sprang from his horse and threw the reins upon a rail of the gate, then hurried up the walk and knocked at the door. It was the same door at which Kevin had knocked when on his weary tramp so many years ago; and one of Rachel Webb's handmaidens opened to him.

The distressed wayfarers were kindly invited in; Fan was lifted off her horse and hurried under shelter; and a fair, placid woman in grey garments and a white muslin cap met her in the hall with a welcome. "Let me step into your kitchen," said Fan, smiling and rosy; "my dripping skirts will do less harm there than anywhere else."

As she stepped into the kitchen, and stood full in the light, she made a picture, with her clinging draperies, her blooming cheeks, and the wet tangle of her ruffled hair curling about her pretty head and neck.

Rachel Webb looked at her attentively, and then said: "Young friend, I have met thee before!"

GOOD-BYE.

A

TRIVIAL phrase that flies from lip to lip,
It serves to punctuate the page of life,

From the scarce breathed comma to the break

Of Death's full stop, when friends must part indeed,
And know for what it is the last good-bye;

When time's insatiate stammering is hushed

And an eternal silence speaks for all.

When I am bid "good-bye," I ever hear
Or loud or faint the closing of a door,

Which leaves my soul outside, some joy within,
Some sympathetic circle made complete,
Where I once was, but am not any more;
A shadowed portent of eternal loss,
Of outer darkness sundered from the light.
Yet, as a lance was thought itself to salve
The wound it had inflicted, so this phrase,
Read but as "God be with you," is a charm
Against the pain of parting, for with God
Is all that man can love, and " no good-bye."

I.

UP AND ROUND MONT BLANC.

BY NATHANAEL COLGAN.

III.-CHAMOUNI TO COURMAYEUR.

THERE are two ways of reaching Courmayeur from Chamouni; one, direct, over the Col du Géant; another, roundabout, by the Col de Voza, Col du Bonhomme, and Col de la Seigne. By the first, a laborious glacier track, crossing the eastern shoulder of Mont Blanc at a height of 11,000 feet, Courmayeur may be reached with a guide in one long day from Chamouni; following the second route, which leads right round the south-western half of the Mont Blanc range, a good walker, in good training and not too heavily weighted, may reach the same point without a guide in two days. I selected the second route; but set apart three days for the round, so as to leave an ample margin for the various forms of dawdling that make up half the charm of an alpine tramp.

It was a lovely morning when I started from Chamouni, shortly before seven o'clock, on the 11th of August, guideless, and carrying a knapsack of twelve pounds weight. The Savoyard Audreys were singing as they bound the ripe sheaves in the corn-fields by the roadside; the grazing kine sent up a merry tinkling of bells from the dewy pastures; the Arve, half veiled in pearly mist, rushed along with its everlasting hoarse murmur; and far above all Mont Blanc, present to the consciousness as a vague feeling of immensity even when the eyes were withdrawn from its snows and glaciers, rose up gleaming in the sunshine. On the left, the mountains bounding the valley fell below the snow-line, and were thickly clad nearly to the summit with dense dark pine-woods, here and there

little mountain pastures of dazzling verdure, basking in the sun a thousand feet above the valley in places seemingly inaccessible to the widest zig-zags.

Just as the seventh kilomètre stone from Chamouni is passed, I am overtaken by the summer diligence to Geneva, a lumbering, topheavy machine tightly packed with passengers overhead and bearing on its panels in large capitals the not unnecessary words of comfort: "Omnibus-Diligence Inversable”—“ Unupsettable Omnibus Diligence." Then comes the village of Les Ouches, and I leave the high road, and striking into the track for the Col de Voza, begin to wind upward through charming snatches of orchard, surrounding substantial, VOL. VIII., No. 81.

il

warm-toned châlets of red pine. Your better sort of châlet here in the vale of Chamouni, such as some of these on the track up to the Col de Voza, is the very ideal of solid rural comfort. The ample store of fire-wood, packed neatly and tightly round the walls, under the wide-spreading eaves, suggests visions of bright flame and cheerily crackling logs when the pines outside are sadly drooping their branches under a load of winter snow. The benches of bee-hives, too, ranged in the sunlight with jolly, broad-faced sun-flowers lolling their heads above them; the little orchard close, with its well-laden apple and cherry-trees, and the vine-fence, where the heavy clusters peep out coyly from the shade of the leaves; the grave-paced cattle, shambling home from the pasture, all speak of honest, wholesome toil, crowned with peace and plenty.

Three hours and a half from Chamouni brought me to the naked stone auberge on the top of the Col de Voza, at the height of 5,500 feet, where I rested for an hour and took mid-day dinner. From the end window of the guest-chamber here, a glorious vision of the Mont Blanc range flashes on the eye, a vision rather than a waking sight; for these majestic billows of snow, outlined against the clear blue sky, have always something visionary and unsubstantial in their aspect. The foreground of the picture is a smoothly rolling green pasture flooded in sunlight, where a few scattered cattle are lazily browsing the grass to a dreamy tinkling of their bells, pausing now and then to ruminate and stare abstractedly at an artist who sits under the shelter of his white cotton umbrella, sketching in the outline of the valley of Chamouni. Here, with appetites sharpened by mountain air, I and the artist dine cheerfully off an athletic fowl, which, in spite of its brawny limbs and horny feet, we are assured is an alpine chicken, the dinner being enlivened by the thunderous ministrations of a lusty Savoyard handmaiden, who sets the rafters trembling as she trips in hob-nails across the bare plank floor. By halfpast twelve I am on the road again, down hill from the Col de Voza towards the Val de Montjoie. On the left lies the glacier of Bionnassay, descending rapidly from the great peak of the Aiguille du Goûté, on the south-west flank of Mont Blanc, and sending off from its base a strong, full torrent to join the larger stream of the Bon Nant in the valley below. Nearly half an hour is saved by leaving the regular track a short way below the col, crossing the torrent to the hamlet of Champel, and striking the high-road about a mile above Bionnay; but when I reached the scattered châlets of Bionnassay, I was told that the wooden bridge had been swept away by a sudden rise in the water, and that the passage could now only be made with difficulty by a temporary footway of pine trunks. A scramble down the steep slope to the torrent and a few minutes' floundering along its rough, shingly margin brought me to the bridge,

two slender pine stems laid side by side across the current, almost grazing the surface of the water and made slippery by a shower of fine spray. At a distance of a hundred yards nothing seems easier to cross than one of these second-rate glacier torrents, such as this on the path to Champel. But when you stand beside it at one of its narrowest points, where the turbid waters, confined between granite crags, go swirling downwards at a giddy pace, when the roaring of the current among the rocks drowns the sound of your voice, and the angry jets of foam leap up from the very bed of the torrent to shoot through the air in long arcs, you come to feel a certain respect for the thread of seething waters that flies past you, and admit that, though it is, perhaps, little more than two yards wide, you would scarcely see your way out of it if you should chance to fall in with a knapsack on your back. So with due caution the torrent is crossed here by the slippery pine stems, and after a short climb through a strip of thick wood, I strike the path to Champel, and by half-past one find myself under the scorching sun once more, on the high-road to Contamines through the Val de Montjoie.

The Val de Montjoie runs transversely to the valley of Chamouni, following the course of the Bon Nant, a fine torrent sunk in deep, rocky, wooded gorges, and falling into the Arve, between St. Gervais and Sallanches. On a smaller scale, the Montjoie valley has all the beauties of the grand vale of Chamouni; but its slopes being better wooded, its general aspect is softer. The road here is almost level; and about an hour's steady walking brought me to the village of Contamines, the route being dotted all along with small, wayside oratories in Italian fashion. A few minutes' rest here, to cool down and drink a glass of Chamouni beer in the bar-parlour of the Bonhomme, and by three o'clock, I was on the road again, making for Notre Dame de la Gorge, a small, pilgrimage church, where the highroad ceases about forty minutes beyond Contamines: The Bon Nant, here in the enjoyment of a lucid interval, steals quietly along on the right of the road, past low banks sprinkled with stumpy alders, like a lazy English midland stream; on the left rises up a wall of naked rock, whose dark brown is set off by thick tufts of bright-green parsley fern. Then comes the steep path to the châlet of Nant Borant, a painful track over wide sheets of smooth water-and-glacier-worn rocks in sound of the Nant, now raging madly in the gorges on the right. Another half hour and a small stone bridge crosses the torrent, dimly seen far below through the gloom of its narrow, rocky cleft, in gleamings of snowy foam; then the pines cease for a space, the châlet comes into view at last, on a stretch of rugged pasture in front of the beautiful Aiguille de Tre la Tête, and by five o'clock, just ten hours from Chamouni, I am in possession of a bedroom in this most secluded of mountain inns.

Arrangements at the châlet of Nant Borant, in that they are primitive, are, so far, in harmony with the prevailing rock formations of the mountains round about it. In one corner of an ample quadrangle, enclosed by a low wall, stands the original châlet itself, sending off at right angles two lines of wooden sheds, one appropriated to the cattle, the other, seemingly an after-thought, set apart for travellers. On the side opposite the travellers' shed is a small wooden pavilion, a true belvidere, for its window looks out directly across the valley of the Bon Nant to the lovely glacier of Tre la Tête, lifted up high in air some 7,000 feet above the dark band of pines clothing the base of the Aiguille. This pavilion serves as dining-room, and at a pinch, no doubt, on the rare occasions when Nant Borant is stormed by a rush of half a dozen travellers at once, can be turned into a spare bedroom. There are four bedrooms proper in the travellers' wing of the châlet, spare, too, in a different sense of the word; for when washing at the plank toilet-table, it is quite possible for one to bruise his elbows against the bedsteads. But though space is limited, it must be said, in bare justice to Nant Borant, that everything is clean and fresh. After a long day's tramp and a hearty meal on the simple but plentiful fare to be had here-good coffee, glorious milk fresh from the mountain herd, fresh butter, fresh eggs, Gruyère, and home-made bread-more carnal food may be got at the châlet by those unhappy mortals who must have the flesh-pots seven days in the week-you may turn into your spare bedroom, filled with the wild woodland scent of the naked pine planks which line it, walls, and floor, and roof, and sleep as soundly as if stretched on down under rose-pink curtains. The accommodation at Nant Borant, no doubt, is not perfect; perhaps, among other drawbacks, the plank bedrooms do reek unpleasantly at eventide, after basking in the sunshine through a long August day. But, primitive as is this châlet-inn, all true lovers of nature must fervently hope that it may never be supplanted by some huge, staring Grand Hôtel Imperial de Nant Borant to profane the solemn beauty of this mountain solitude.

The sun goes down gloriously that evening, as I sit in the pavilion with my next-door neighbour, the occupant of packingcase No. 3, a melancholy little Englishman, on the wrong side of fifty, who is making the tour from Chamouni to Courmayeur in two days, with mules and guides. The snows and glaciers glittering on the flanks of the beautiful Aiguille in front grow dim as the rays of the sinking sun glide upwards from off them to tip the naked summit crags with gold; the hoarse monotonous roar of the torrent below comes out clearer through the deepening silence; and as the gray gloaming settles down on the valley, bringing with it a rapid chill in the air, colour and sheen die slowly away from the woods and the mountains. Then the cattle pacing gravely home from the pastures,