This was to be his life work, and it so placed him be- LITTLE 

 fore the world, that whatever he said or did had a JOURNEYS 

 wide significance and an extended influence. 



'YNDALL was a most intrepid mountain 

 climber. The Alps lured him like the song 

 of the Lorelei, and the wonder was that 

 his body was not left in some mountain 

 crevasse, "the most beautiful and poetic 

 of all burials," he once said. 

 But for him this was not to be, for fate is fond of 

 irony. The only man who ever braved the full dangers 

 of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado was killed by a 

 suburban train in Chicago while on his wedding tour. 

 Most bad men die in bed tenderly cared for by trained 

 nurses in white caps and big aprons. Tyndall climbed 

 to the summit of the Matterhorn, ascended the so- 

 called inaccessible peak of the Weisshorn, scaled 

 Mount Blanc three times, and once was caught in an 

 avalanche riding toward death at the rate of a mile a 

 minute. Yet he passed away from an overdose, or a 

 wrong dose of medicine given him through mistake, 

 by the hands of the woman he loved most. 

 At one time Tyndall attempted to swim a mountain 

 torrent; the stream as if angry with his Irish assur- 

 ance, tossed him against the rocks, brought him back 

 in fierce eddies, and again and again threw him against 

 a solid face of stone. When he was rescued he was a 

 mass of bruises, but fortunately no bones were broken. 



77 



