World. He will not find it in the fastnesses of Switzerland. There the once overwhelming accumulations of snow, which filled the mountain valleys to the level of their topmost peaks, no longer supply the glacial streams with material for bergs. The ice fields have dwindled to insignificant areas, and their discharge is, for the most part, fluvial, though much of their bulk is dissipated by evaporation or absorption into the warm earth of the lower altitudes. But in Greenland, which has recently been investigated by Danish explorers, the ice fields were found to cover the country like a pall, for 1,500 miles, from Cape Farewell to the furthest discovered point, and their breadth is absolutely unknown. Out of the almost interminable waste of frigid desolation pours the great glacier Sermitsialik, with a width of from two to four miles, completely occupying the valley out of which it debouches to the depth of 2,000 feet or more. It is only one of hundreds of similar frozen rivers, all of which, as far as is known, are pigmies beside the great Humboldt glacier discovered by Dr. Kane at the head of Smith Sound. This is sixty miles in width, with enclosing walls of rock a thousand feet high. Its front abuts the sea, and is washed by the waves like any other coast line.

From these Titanic sources of perpetual supply are emitted those stupendous icebergs which fill the north Atlantic from June to August to an extent that dozens can be counted from the masthead within the scope of view. The dimensions of some of them are incredible. I have seen one off the coast of Labrador which was estimated to be two miles long and 300 feet high; and this great mass was sloughed off entire from the Humboldt sea wall with one tremendous cleavage, plunge, and surge, as a great ship leaves the ways. Such mountains of ice are perpetually falling all along the line, with an intermittent crash and roar like the tumult of a tempest. The din of the great commotion can be heard for miles. It is an axiom that mechanical forces are best comprehended by their products; so that no one can begin to realize what a stupendous factor a glacier is until he sees the measure of its infinite power thus made supremely manifest.

The glaciers of the North Pacific are much smaller in

comparison, but the Muir is three miles long, with a perpendicular face of 400 feet, stretching like a frozen waterfall or gigantic dam entirely across the head of the bay. Its breast is as blue as turquoise. At a distance it looks like a fillet rent from the azure sky and laid across the brow of the cliff. When the full blaze of the southwestern sun lights up its opalescence, it gleams like the gates of the celestial city. I suppose that an iceberg of no insignificant size is sloughed off from some portion of its sea wall as often as once in five minutes, but these detachments seldom represent more than a limited section, and most of them break up into comparatively small fragments before they are fairly launched on their seaward journey. Visitors are told that glaciers move at a rate of so many feet or inches daily. Ocular evidence may be obtained by fixed landmarks, which indicate a stated progression. From the size and frequency of the cleavages here it would seem that the progress of the Muir must be several rods a day, though an estimate can only be approximated, as there is no true alignment, and the centre moves faster than the sides.

Long before the steamer reaches the entrance of Glacier Bay straggling lumps of ice appear dazzling white, and resting like blocks of marble on the polished sea, which is scarcely moved by an imperceptible swell pulsating through the Sound. The sun is warm and grateful, and the sky without a cloud, excepting those which stretch like filmy gauze from peak to peak, the temperature perhaps 60o in the shade. Half of the passengers have never seen an ice cake and they are eager with excitement to get near the polar videttes which are drifting by, away off under the land. The course of the vessel bears gradually toward the headland at the entrance, and the lumps of ice become more numerous. Bevies of ladies rush to the taffrail as one of them passes close under the counter. Presently a passing promontory opens out a large iceberg of fantastic shape, and then another, tall and stately, with turrets like a castle. Sea gulls, hagden and shags hover about their gleaming walls like snow flakes in the air, or sit in solemn ranks upon the battlements. Objects change positions constantly and countermarch across the field of view. Fancies dis

solve before they are scarcely formed. Reflections from the land appear in darksome shades across the water, and from the looming icebergs in tremulous semblances, ghostlike and pallid. The scenic effects, at once so magical and duplicated everywhere, grow momentarily more weird.

Meantime the steamer slacks her headway, slows down, and presently with a sullen thud lays alongside a small berg, whose rounded apex peers up over the dead eyes into the head of the companionway, looking for all the world as if it was going to come aboard. All the curious ladies pipe a combination scream, and make for the door of the Captain's stateroom. Then the quarter boat is swung out of the davits and lowered away, and the steward and the mate and the sailors tackle the glistening harlequin with pikes and axes, and, after much chopping and manœuvring with bights and bowlines, contrive to split off a big lump, and hoist it inboard with a sling. This supply is for the ice chest. How pure and cold and beautiful and transparent it is! How precious to passengers who have bee for two days stinted, and to the steward whose meat was likely to spoil! The chunks cut off seem colorless, but the central core of the berg itself glows like a great blue eye, sentient and expressive, with that sort of poetical light termed "spirituelle." You never tire of gazing into the translucent depths of the glacier ice, whose radiance emulates the blue and green of beryl, torquoise, chrisophas and emerald. You gaze into them as into the arcana of the empyrean, with some vague awe of their mysterious source, and the intangible causes which gave them birth. And the grand icebergs !-so cold, yet so majestic, so solid yet so unsubstantial; so massive, yet so ethereal!-whose bastions and battlements are mighty enough to shiver an onset, and yet so volatile that the warmth of wooing spring will dissipate them into vapor. Children of the Arctic frost conceived in the upper air, inspired by the effulgent sun, and moulded in the bowels of intensest congelation, the human mind cannot contemplate them without a sympa, thetic inspiration, for their duplex entity is so like our combination of soul and body!

A stiff breeze was blowing as we entered Glacier Bay, and the breath came bitterly cold from off the ice field.

The bay was filled with floating bergs and floes, and the temperature dropped quite rapidly to 46°. The ruffled surface of the water assumed that peculiar tinge of cold steel gray which landscapes wear in winter. The atmos phere put on a sympathetic hue and grew perceptibly denser. Snow covered all the peaks, and the Mer de Glace spread out before us like a great white apron on the lap of the mountain. It is twelve miles from the entrance to the head of the bay, and over the entire landscape nature seemed dead. Not a living thing appeared-not a gull on the wing or a seal in the gloomy fiords. Desolation reigned throughout, for there was nothing to sustain life. The creation was all new, and the glacier was still at work gradually preparing it for the abode of organic life. Darkness only was needed to relegate us to the primordium of chaos. But the sun was bright on the distant peaks, which enclosed the bay on all sides, and their intangible, ghostly outlines, scarcely distinguished from the fleecy clouds about them, seemed indefinitely beyond the convex line of earth. Seldom is mundane gloom and supernal glory contrasted by such startling juxtaposition.

As the steamer neared the glacier, speculations began respecting the height of its perpendicular front, but no one guessed higher than the vessel's topmast. It was only when she lay anchored in ninety fathoms of water, close under the ice, and not a quarter of a mile from shore, that spectators began to conceive the magnitude of the glacier and all its surroundings. The glacier wall overhung us with its mighty majesty, and we seemed none too far away to escape the constantly cleaving masses which dropped from its face with deafening detonations. The foam which gathered from the impetus of the plunges surged upward fully two-thirds of the height of the cliff, and the resulting swell tossed the large steamer like a toy, and rolled up in breakers of surf upon the beach. The vessel was in actual danger from the fragments of ice which occasionally thumped against her sides. Indeed, her wheels were afterward badly mashed in making her way out of the bay into open A paddle wheel steamer is unfit for such navigation, and I suppose a propeller will be used hereafter. The glacier wall is by no means smooth, but is seamed

water.

and riven in every part by clefts and fissures. It is hollowed into caverns and grottoes, hung with massive stalactites, and fashioned into pinnacles and domes. Every section and configuration has its heart of translucent blue or green, interlaced or bordered by fretted frost-work of intensest white; so that the appearance is at all times gnome-like and supernatural. No portion of the wall ever seems to pitch forward all at once in a sheer fall from top to bottom, but sections split off from the buttresses, or drop from midway or the top. The apparent slowness of their descent is sublimity itself, because it carries with it the measure of its stupendous vastness and inappreciable height. Impressions of magnitude and majesty, I opine, are not conveyed so much by any relative standard of comparison as by the degree with which we come within the range of their power or influence. One must realize before he can appreciate, and he cannot realize fully until he becomes to a certain extent a participator. Proximity shudders and trembles at what remoteness and impunity views with dispassionate equanimity. I cannot conceive how any one can sit close by and contemplate without emotion the stupendous throes which give birth to the icebergs, attended with detonations like explosions of artillery and reverberations of thunder across the sky, and the mighty wreckage which follows each convulsion. He would hardly be appalled at the crack of doom. I say we cannot estimate their magnitude by contiguous objects, because they are all unfamiliar. The steamer itself, although considerable in size seems like an atom. As for the rest, the fragments of ice which are seen stranded along the beach, looking no larger than blocks, measure twelve feet high. Those lumps drifting past yonder fiord are icebergs higher than our topmast. The other side of the bay which, we imagine, one could swim across with ease, is five miles off. The ice ledge itself is four hundred feet high. The peaks in the distance, forty miles away, are sixteen thousand feet above the level of the sea. There is the Devil's Thumb, looking no higher than the Washington monument, a sheer monolith six thousand feet high, with faces almost perpendicular. The timber line around the feet of the distant ranges resembles a cincture of moss.