I9O DONKEY IN DANGER. 
beds of rocks, or to squeeze between their sharp 
edges : but then the rocks were firm, or it might 
have been worse. 
Even Mrs. Maxwell’s experience verified this, 
for once, when she and some friends crossed the 
range, they came to a place where the stones 
had a trick of sliding, and a poor packed donkey 
was given a gratuitous ride twenty-five or thirty 
feet down the mountain-side, and only prevented 
from being dashed to pieces over a precipice by 
the moving stones clogging for a few moments. 
A single movement would have started them on, 
but poor Jack was so terrified that he lay per- 
fectly still until a man, risking his own life, 
crawled to a point where he could throw ropes 
about the poor brute, with which to draw him up. 
And once, on another trip, the whole party slid 
down a mountain-side into a lake, which they 
were obliged to ford as best they could, and from 
whose imprisoning valley they were twenty-four 
hours in finding a possible way of escape. 
Without diversifying their ascent by any such 
exciting episodes, they toiled on until at length 
they stood upon the summit, where falling snow- 
flakes part company, to meet again only when the 
waves of commingling oceans touch. For a 
time all was forgotten save the magnificent pros- 
pect spread out before them. On one side the 
valleys of the Park, with their distant walls of 
