the Alps, and was familiar with all the legends. And when we were seated again around the fire, which the host had replenished with a fagot of crackling fire-wood, the German re-lighted his pipe, and told us this story of the Bride of the Ice-King. If it should appear tame in the reading, beside a Christmas blaze, it must be remembered, that I listened to it first in a storm at midnight, upon the wild heights of the Scheideck.
Many, many years ago, (it was thus his story began,) there lived upon the edge of the valley of Lauterbrunnen a peasant, who had a beautiful daughter, by the name of Clothilde. Her hair was golden, and flowed in ringlets upon a neck which would have rivalled that of the fairest statue of antiquity. Her eye was hazel and bright, but with a pensive air, which, if the young herdsmen of the valley looked on only once, they never forgot in their lives.
The mother of Clothilde, who had died when she was young, came, it was said, from some foreign land; none knew of her lineage; and the people of the valley had learned only that the peasant, whose wife she became, had found her lost upon the mountains.
The peasant was an honest man, and mourned for the mother of Clothilde, because she had shared his labors, and had lighted pleasantly the solitary path of his life. But Clothilde, though the mother died when she was young, clung ever tenderly to her memory, and persisted always that she would find her again where her father had found her—upon the mountains. It was in vain they showed her the grave where her mother lay buried, in the village church-yard.
"No, no," she would say, "my mother is not there;" and her eyes lifted to the mountains.
Yet no one thought Clothilde was crazed; not a maiden of all the village of Lauterbrunnen performed better her household cares than the beautiful Clothilde. Not one could so swiftly ply the distaff; not one who could show such store of white cloth, woven from the mountain flax. She planted flowers by the door of her father's cottage; she watched over all his comforts; she joined with the rest in the vil-
