ledge. I fancy the old landlord to this day believes that Greene and myself were two of the cleverest fellows that ever slept over a cow-house.

The landlord had said he could not make out where all the snow came from, for it melted and ran away into the rivers, and yet it did not seem to decrease. I was at him in a minute, for I knew all about it. It certainly is a most delicious feeling to be able to trot out your knowledge, and find yourself all of a sudden a wonderfully clever fellow, making a tremendous sensation. I gave my scientific lecture in the following words :

"I need not tell you, gentlemen, that the earth receives its heat from the sun; of course you all know this." (This compliment visibly affected Kingstone, who never knew anything about the matter.) "If you will permit me," (if they had refused, it wouldn't have mattered) "I will compare the earth to a heated cannon-ball, suspended in the air, and continually radiating the heat which it has absorbed from what I may term the furnace of the sun. It therefore stands to reason, that the further you recede from this heated earth the colder the atmosphere becomes. Do you understand that?

Kingstone cried impatiently, "Do you take me for an idiot?" but, remembering the sage remark, that sometimes the truth is unpleasant, I withheld my cutting reply, and continued my learned discourse.

"Many persons foolishly imagine"-I stared at Kingstone"that the atmosphere is warmed by the rays of the sun passing through it. This is an ignorant mistake. We know better. Gases (and the air is gaseous, my friends) are such bad absorbents of heat, that they permit it to pass through them without their temperature being raised. The sun's rays pass through the atmosphere without suffering the slightest diminution of warmth. They go direct to, and are absorbed by, the earth, which, in its turn, like the cannon-ball referred to, imparts its heat to the

surrounding air. Those who have travelled in balloons will tell you that the higher they ascended from the earth the colder the atmosphere became, just as the further you recede from the heated cannon-ball the less will its warmth be felt.

"This fact being admitted, I now, gentlemen, come to the second part of my lecture. I must explain to you that the atmosphere presses on the earth with a force equal to fifteen pounds on every square inch of surface. Consequently it must be obvious to the dullest comprehension" (Kingstone began to growl and scowl) "that the air next to the globe, which sustains the whole weight of the atmosphere above it, must be more dense than the higher strata. Now, it is known that the temperature of compressed air-such as that near the earth-is more easily raised by a given quantity of heat than when the air is rarified-such as that on the mountains."

Kingstone remarked: "That's rum!"

I took no notice of this coarse interruption, for fear I might forget what I was going to say, but rattled on with dazzling effect. "Pray remember, gentlemen, that the warm air we breathe in the plains always contains more or less moisture, which is kept in the form of vapour by the heat radiated from the earth. If you pass over a newly-ploughed field, you will see the steam rising up from it in a kind of quivering vapour. There is a continual evaporation taking place from the earth, which may be said to resemble the perspiration of a man. A man perspires insensibly thirty-three ounces of fluid in twentyfour hours, and this takes place even when you are what you term cool. Now it has been reckoned, that the evaporation from the surface of the whole earth amounts annually to no less than thirty-five inches deep of fluid. Then where does all this evaporation go to?"

There was a dead silence among my audience when I asked this question. Of course, I should not have asked unless I had

known they couldn't answer me. I went off again in grand style:-"Why, as long as this steam is in the valley, nobody can detect it, because the warm dense air keeps it in vapour ; but when once this evaporation has ascended to the height of the mountain tops, where the atmosphere is so rare that it cannot retain much of the earth's warmth, then the earth's perspiration ceases to remain in its fluid state, but becomes converted by the cold into snow. This is the reason why Mont Blanc continually wears

6

a diadem of snow.""

“Tiens!” said the old landlord; “ que c'est curieux! C'est une drole de chose, la nature."

Greene evidently thought I had taken up my share of the time, and that it was now his turn to say something, so off he went at a rapid wound-up pace. He has an awful memory.

"Mountains may be considered as the source of the earth's fertility. Not only do they defend the valleys and the plains from the wind of the tempest, but it is also to them that we owe our rivers, our springs, and very often our rain." (This was nearly word for word from my 3s. 6d. book.) "High land, it is known, attracts the clouds which may be sailing through the air. Again, the transparent atmosphere begins to deposit its vapour at the summit of the mountain, and in a short time the cloud is formed, which goes on increasing and increasing, until the whole sky is obscured. When the specific gravity of the cloud becomes greater than that of the air, the rain falls."

Kingstone could not stand Ralph's retailed science any longer. He burst out laughing, and said, "Hadn't you better read it from the book at once?" I pretended to be deeply interested, but I was getting slightly jealous.

"Manchester," continued Ralph, "is always spoken of as the wettest town in England,' and this is said to be owing to its proximity to the Derbyshire hills. If there were no mountains, the world would be one large desert-for vegetation

depends upon moisture. (The book again.) Supposing you could take a jolly big mountain, and drop it right in the centre of the great Sahara Desert of Africa, you would very soon turn its vast sandy plains into as good land as ever let at five pounds an acre."

Kingstone only said "Hem!" and I nodded approvingly, as if I had known all about it before.

Greene, finding nobody spoke, went on again. "The most curious thing is, that the snow on the top of Mont Blanc is not a bit like the snow we usually see. It does not fall in flakes, but comes down like small shot. You couldn't make a snow ball of it if you were to try till you were black in the face."

"How do you know?" said Kingstone. up there."

been

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"You have never

'No," answered Greene; "I know that, and I have never been in Africa, but I am sure there are black men in it. Don't interrupt a fellow-hem! There is what they call a snow line' on the mountains; that is to say, that all above that line is snow. The glaciers we saw a little time ago commence where the 'snow line' terminates. They are only snow passing into ice, and streaming in a frozen state into the valleys. The most curious part of these glaciers is, that they are always moving. A clever chap, named Professor Forbes, says that in twentyfour hours a glacier he experimented upon advanced sixteen inches and a-half. It is a lucky thing for the picturesque inhabitants of this romantic land that these glaciers do not advance more quickly, or else the valleys would be overwhelmed by a deluge of ice, and they would find their peculiar situation far from gratifying to their feelings. IIem! hem!"

Kingstone could n't help laughing at Ralph's grand ending to his lecture, although he was beginning to get impatient, and had already asked twice whether we were going to sit there

talking all day long, adding, that he had not come to Switzerland to hear a lot of stupid lectures about things that nobody could be sure of. He was just getting up in a passion, when the landlord happened to say, "Ah! and there are the avalanches; they are, indeed, terrible. I have seen hundreds ; and even to think of them makes me tremble."

The avalanche had always been a peculiar object of dread to Kingstone. When he heard the landlord say he had seen hundreds of them, he took his cap off and cried out, "You don't mean to tell me you've seen a hundred real avalanches!" I believe Kingstone had a notion that avalanches existed all over Switzerland; for once at Geneva he turned as pale as a ground-glass shade, because somebody said "There would be a heavy fall of snow before night."

This subject seemed to be the landlord's pet one. Up to this time he had been standing, but now he sat himself in a chair, as if he considered that since we had taken him into conversation, he had a right to make himself at home.

"There are avalanches of summer, and there are avalanches of winter. In summer, the underneath snow melts from the heat of the earth, and then the fields of snow on the top peel off like so much wadding, and fall in an avalanche. In winter, when the wind has driven the snow before it, and swept it up into heaps on the sides of mountains and precipices, then these masses collect and collect until they overbalance themselves, and then with a roar that forces a prayer from you, down they roll, huge plains of snow, like a lake of frozen water. By so slight a hold do some of the avalanches cling to the mountain side, that even firing off a pistol, by making the air tremble, will loosen them and bring them down just as if they had been shot. When the snow slides down the mountain side, we call them creeping avalanches, because they come down as slowly