234 SCIENCE SKETCHES. 
road for a heavy man to toil up. Besides, the 
story of the first climbers was fresh in his mind. 
But the boys were persistent, and they said, “ You 
have talked and talked about mountains, and you 
have never done a single big thing among them; 
and it is time you did!” And so they kept it up. 
And I remembered that Tyndall had thought it 
worth his while to try again and again to go up 
this mountain, and so had my Italian namesake, 
the geologist Giordano. Then why not I? 
At last we three shook hands upon it, and went 
back to the hotel to make arrangements. After- 
wards three others joined us, making six in all.? 
And we sought out “ John the Baptist,” and made 
him our chief guide, and directed him to provide 
food and ropes for eleven, and we were “in for” 
the Matterhorn. 
Meanwhile the boys wrote letters home, — letters 
full of descriptions of the Matterhorn, which kept 
their mothers and sisters awake o’ nights for a 
week. And the sketches of the mountain with 
which they embellished them were wonderful to 
behold. In the evening some of them strolled out 
to the little graveyard at Zermatt, —to the tombs 
of Hadow, Hudson, and Michel Croz, the first vic- 
tims of the Matterhorn, — “ for inspiration,” they 
said; and some of them composed epitaphs, which 
they have not yet needed. 
At one o’clock the next morning the porter of 
the Hétel Monte Rosa knocked at our doors, and 
1 Professor Charles H. Gilbert, Professor Melville B. Anderson, 
Mr. William W. Spangler, Mr. William E. Beach, Mr. Walter O. 
Williams, and the writer. 
