n6 FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



ice rather than white ice if you wish for a block which 

 will last. 



Before leaving the glaciers, let me briefly relate an 

 incident arising from their slow but regular downward 

 flow to the region where they melt away and deposit, as 

 a terminal moraine, the burden of rocks they have re- 

 ceived years before in regions far above. A young 

 man of five-and- twenty, on his honeymoon, visited 

 the Alps, and ventured alone on to a glacier. He 

 fell into a deep u crevasse, 11 or ice-fissure, and his body 

 was not recovered. The exact spot where he fell 

 into the ice-chasm was recognised, and the mountain- 

 folk, who knew their glacier and its rate of movement 

 well, told the broken-hearted young widow that it 

 would take thirty years before that region of the glacier 

 would have moved so far downwards as to reach the 

 lowest limit, and in due course melt away. She 

 haunted the glacier in which her young husband was 

 entombed year after year, and at last, when she was 

 now grey-headed and withered by time, that special 

 tract of ice had descended so far, and was so near the 

 thawing, thinned-out margin of the glacier that they 

 were able to break into it with axe and pole. Then 

 she, an old woman, had a wonderful experience. They 

 led her to the glacier's edge. Her young husband, pre- 

 served these thirty years in the ice, which had melted 

 around him and re-frozen, lay there unchanged. His 

 features were not marred by the lapse of years, nor was 

 his clothing rent or injured. He seemed as one asleep, 

 resting after a long day's climb, and she, poor soul, had, 

 during a blissful interval, the conviction that all those 

 weary years of waiting were but a long, bad dream, that 

 she, too, still was young, and was waking, as she had 

 loved to do long years ago, in time to see him lift his 

 lids and smile. 



