would come the active joys of the climb, the renewal of youth, the solution of care, the bath of sore souls, balm of hurt minds. Only one of the great writers seems to have known:

Carry your fever to the Alps, you of minds diseased; not to sit down in sight of them ruminating, for bodily ease and comfort will trick the soul and set you measuring our lean humanity against yonder sublime and infinite; but mount, rack the limbs, wrestle it out among the peaks; taste danger, sweat, earn rest; learn to discover ungrudgingly that haggard fatigue is the fair vision you have run to earth, and that rest is your uttermost reward. Would you know what it is to hope again, and have all your hopes at hand? Hang upon the crags at a gradient that makes your next step a debate between the thing you are and the thing you may become. There the merry little hopes grow for the climber like flowers and food, immediate, prompt to prove their uses, sufficient if just within the grasp, as mortal hopes should be. How the old lax life closes in about you there! You are the man of your faculties, nothing more. Why should a man pretend to be more? We ask it wonderingly when we are healthy. Poetic rhapsodists in the vales below may tell you of the joy and grandeur of the upper regions; they cannot pluck you the medical herb. He gets that for himself who wanders the marshy ledge at nightfall to behold the distant Sennhüttchen twinkle, who leaps the green-eyed crevasses, and in the solitude of an emerald alp stretches a salt hand to the mountain kine.

VI

Among mountains miracles happen with ease; the sun can stand still in the heavens and the dawn be undone

and the sun that has set return to the sky. We went up through deepening twilight one midsummer evening to sleep at the hut beside the Orny Pass. Two hours' walk below the pass the sun said good-night. Far down behind us darkness filled the depths of the wooded Val Ferret. At nine o'clock we topped the Orny Pass to find time had turned back and the full pomp of sunset was burning russet and crimson before us, across the snowfield of Trient. I went the other way a few days after, leaving the hut on the pass at five in the morning. Up there the rocks and ice already glared in hot light; stones had begun to fall, for the lashings and bindings the frost had made fast for the night were being untied by the sun. As I glissaded down the glacier and the glen below it, the snow hardened under my feet, the sun passed out of sight, the village of Orsières, below, was still involved in seminight; I looked down upon unvanished mist and obscurity and descended, as the hour advanced, into a pit of twilight that thickened and grew colder.

Why should such passages fill one's mind with so quick a rush of delight? Heaven knows. Perhaps they are Romance; it has been called the addition of strangeness to beauty. But why, indeed, should any of these sudden ravishments befall us, at the instance of things that we see? You know that swift, abrupt flood of enchantment:

Look! under that broad beech-tree I sat down, when I was last this way a-fishing. And the birds in the adjoining grove seemed to have a friendly contention with an echo, whose dead voice seemed to live in a hollow tree, near to

the brow of that primrose hill. There I sat viewing the silver streams glide silently towards their centre, the tempestuous sea; yet sometimes opposed by rugged roots and pebblestones, which broke their waves, and turned them into foam. And sometimes I beguiled time by viewing the harmless lambs; some leaping securely in the cool shade, whilst others sported themselves in the cheerful sun-and saw others craving comfort from the swollen udders of their bleating dams. As I sat thus, these and other sights had so fully possest my soul with content, that I thought, as the poet has happily expressed it:

I was for that time lifted above earth,

And possest joys not promised in my birth.

Why, for the matter of that, should we fall in love, men with women and women with men, in whom most other people can see nothing to make any fuss about? Many, no doubt, will think what sorry gush these rhapsodies of the amateur mountaineer are; mere lover's rant. And yet every true lover has got hold of something of which he who has never had it can scarcely guess the worth. No lover has ever yet got it across the footlights to him who was never in love. To be rightly in love, to explore a new world, to discover Shakespeare-really discover him for yourself to find yourself in the practice of an art, to achieve total absorption in some purpose not mean these are the indefeasible good things of life; but also they are its incommunicables. To achieve any one of the list is to be shut up alone with a glorious secret

you want to tell every one else. But all you can do is to wait and watch the divine spark falling on somebody, just

here and there, by some sort of chance, far beyond your control, and not falling on others.

What could young Porphyro impel

To venture in the foeman's den?
What lore makes clear to us the spell
That sped the feet of Imogen?

Words fail you? So the mountaineer
Loves yon majestic dome of snow—
To him 'tis passionately dear,

As Juliet was to Romeo.

Who knows, fond questioner, how soon
On thee shall fall the sacred fire,
And thou on some great peak at noon,
Feeling, shalt need not to inquire.

That is to say, if those disordered exchanges should ever take a good turn. They say that the frequency of marriages has decreased tragically in England since Europe's business affairs fell into confusion. "Jack hath not Jill." So is it, too, with the snowy-robed Juliet of Mr. Yeld's excellent verse. One Romeo, to my knowledge, has not the fare to Verona.

WHEN THE MAP IS IN TUNE

I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe.

R. L. STEVENSON.

I

T hurts to think of the pleasures that people turn

away from their doors.

There are some who have

not even learnt to read maps.

"Read" is the word

mostly used, but "tune" would be better. For, till you know the trick, a fine map is about the nearest thing there

is to

a cunning instrument cased up,

Or, being open, put into his hands

That knows no touch to tune the harmony.

Unless you are a mountaineer, an engineer, or a surveyor, the odds are that the great illumination will escape you, all your life; you may return to the grave without having ever known what it is like when the contour lines begin to sing together, like the Biblical stars.

Those contour lines are the crux. The beginner, the infant at this game, craves for a hill-coloured map, with its expressive coloured scale, from the lush green of alluvial meadows a few feet above the sea-level to sultry reddish-brown for Snowdon and the Cumbrian hills. Quite good things are they, too, in their way, as pretty nursery rhymes are good till you grow up enough to like Shelley. They give you fine vivid notions about the general modelling of a country. In fact we might want