much exhausted, and faint with the rarefied air, we reached the summit. No one, of course, cared a straw for the view; and as we feared we were all frost-bitten, we started back as soon as possible-two of the party being so done up that they had to be supported.

Next morning, when I went to see my comrades, I found the doctor lancing the toes of two-one of whom lost a joint, and they were both in a bad way when I left Chamounix. Mine remained dead for four days, and then revived. But we were all delighted with the expedition.

Alpine climbing is almost entirely a matter of weather; and in fine weather any strong young lady could walk up Mont Blanc. The season was now so advanced that there remained nothing more to do. I had been a day or two short of a month in Switzerland, and I look back upon it as one of the best spent months of my life. With great sadness I drove down to Geneva, in company with one of my companions of the ascent. The setting sun was shedding a warm after-glow upon the snowy summit of Mont Blanc, when at the turn of the road we bade adieu to the Monarch of Mountains,' and

one's heart felt full as when one parts with a dear friend. It was the same when I saw the last of the Matterhorn, coming down the Val Tournache. I stood and waved my hat to him and said, 'Good-bye, old fellow!' just as if he heard me, and I felt quite a choking in the throat.

Mountains awaken a strange human interest and affection, and this explains why one can travel alone so satisfactorily in Switzerland. After a month spent in the open air, Paris on my return seemed positively loathsome. I felt a longing for the mountains, a craving for a precipitous ascent; and the roar of the mountain torrents, and the music of pebbly streams and of cattle-bells at evenings, kept ringing in my ears.

Would that every young fellow could get away among the mountains and have his limbs and heart strengthened, and his eyes and mind opened while they are capable of enlargement and expansion, and before they are irrevocably set and fixed in the narrow conventional moulds! Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits,' but a well-planned month or two abroad opens new horizons of thought and experience, which in itself is a valuable education

Moreover, and especially, would that all could get away among the mountains while their hearts are fresh and susceptible to their up-lifting and bracing influence; because, as no other scenery has the power of doing,

They lift us to the land where all is fair,
The land of which we dream,

and, as naught else that is visible can do, they draw us to Him whose righteousness is like the great mountains,' and lead us in rapture to exclaim, 'O, all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord! praise him, and magnify Him for ever!'

R

CONCLUSION.

ON returning to England I went to the Admiralty and put my name down for a ship, and was in London, getting together the things that I should require, when a chance meeting led to my paying a visit to the Kentish coast, where dwelt a fairy princess with the queen her mother, whose radiance had shone across my path in former years in a certain Priory, where erst they dwelt dispensing bounteous hospitality, and o whom then this pilgrim truly felt that

But to see her was to love her,

Love but her and love for ever.

But yet to whom

He never told his love,

But let concealment like a worm i' the bud,

It was on a dark December day when I rang at their outer gate, and an ancient servitor-not without misgivings-admitted me, for my beard

had grown in foreign travel, and my apparel had somewhat of a Bohemian cast. But suffice it to say that when next the castle-gates were opened, and I emerged from that enchanted. palace, I felt, though December's skies were cold and grey, that

Life was transformed in the soft and tender

Light of love, as a volume dun

Of rolling smoke becomes a wreathed splendour
In the declining sun.

Many giants, in the shape of the usual insuperable difficulties on such occasions, had to be slain; but before that short February month its seeming too long course had run, that sweet doubling of our single life' which men call marriage had, with one of the merriest maids of England, changed the current of my life.

And here, young men, let me say a very few words to you on this—

the only bliss

Of Paradise that has survived the fall,—

on wedded love. Thousands of our countrymen and countrywomen never reach this high estate, and tens of thousands only enter it when their 'hearts are dry as summer dust,' and their love for one another, or what remains of it, has