232 SCIENCE SKETCHES. 
AN ASCENT OF THE MATTERHORN. 
N old miner of ’49 whom I once met in 
California said to me, as we came in sight 
of the snowy crests of Tuolumne and Calaveras: 
“These mountains are not appreciated in Cali- 
fornia. We used to dig and dig in them, and that 
was the end of it. The fact is, stranger, a man 
ought to have two lives,—one to get a living in, 
the other to look at the mountains.” 
But there are some on whom the mountains 
have the first claim; and so there has arisen the 
Alpenclub, — the guild of mountain-lovers whose 
“feet are beautiful upon the mountains,” and to 
which such men as De Saussure and Agassiz and 
Tyndall and Balfour have been proud to belong. 
And thus it happened that on the tenth day of 
August, 1881, a party of young people from In- 
diana, mountain-lovers of varying degrees, walked 
over the snowy pass called the Matterjoch, which 
leads from Italy across the Pennine Alps into 
Switzerland. And ever before us and above us as 
we came up the green valley of Tournanche, ever 
before us as we toiled up the pass, — above us every- 
where, dark, majestic, inaccessible, rose the huge 
pyramid of the grandest of the Alps. No one 
who has ever seen it can ever forget its form. It 
burns itself into the memory as nothing else in all 
