The Bride of the Ice-King.
There is not a prettier valley in Switzerland than that of Lauterbrunnen. Whoever has seen it upon a fine day of summer, when the meadows were green, the streams full, and the sun shining upon the crystal glaciers which lie, from the beginning to the end of the year, at the head of the valley, can never forget it.
I do not think it can be more than a half-mile broad; and in many places, I am sure, it is much less. On one side, the rocks, brown and jagged, and tufted with straggling shrubs, rise almost perpendicularly; and a stream of water which comes from higher slopes, far out of sight, leaps over the edge of the precipice. At first, it is a solid column of water; then it breaks and spreads and wavers with the wind; and finally, in a rich white veil of spray, reaches the surface of the vale of Lauterbrunnen, a thousand feet below. They call it the Dust-Fall.
The opposite side of the valley does not change so suddenly into mountain. There are slopes, green or yellow, as the seasons may be, with the little harvests which the mountain-people raise; there are cliffs with wide niches in them, where you may see kids or sheep cropping the short herbage which grows in the shadow of the rocks; and there is a path, zig-zagging up from the road below, I scarce know how. It would be very tiresome, were it not for the views it gives you at every turning. Sometimes, from under a thicket of trees, you look sheer down upon the little bridge you have traversed in the bottom of the valley; seeming so near, that you could toss your Alpinstock into the brook. Sometimes the green of the meadow, and the
