Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/248

222 222 C. E. MONTAGUE on : a perpetual clicking of fairy-sized sabots in a dance that seems to drill the strung sense : the bow never droops. Or it is like watching a skylark go rocketing up ; you listening breathless to the breathless rain of small notes, ready to relax with a sigh of wondering relief when the bird at last owns itself mortal too, and takes the soft plane back to earth; and finding that the song never does cease, that the bird simply goes on. Listen — Just where the stone tooth rose out of the snow, the snow swelled out, gumlike, a little ; not that the ice which it covered was less steep there than below ; but a little more snow could cling to it there, by freezing on to the unsunned rock ; and so for a couple of feet from the base of the tooth the gum only fell away convex, before dropping sheer. By this hanging shelf the guide set out to steal round to the foot of the pinnacle, gingerly stamping the snow at each step until it would form a hard tread, frozen fast to the steep ice beneath. He was well out of sight round the bulge when his shout came for June to come carefully on. She committed herself to his vestiges. Aubrey, well planted, paid out the rope to her frugally. Warily coasting the swell of the tooth, she paused where it pushed her out furthest. " What's it like ? " Aubrey called. Could she be giving? She glanced back, a merrythought curling her lip. "It's like walking on one stilt. It's made of an icicle, with a hard snowball stuck on to its side, and that's the stilt's step." Did you ever hear such a dancing of dactyls, and tripping of trochees, and ruthless absence of iambs and ease ? Just where the stone tooth rose  out of the  snow, the  snow swelled out, | gum-like, a little Dactyl and dactyl and dactyl again ; then up on the trochee bestriding the comma ; then on again, dactyl and dactyl, with the metallic clink of the last trochee little to plug up the sequence securely. Again — So for a I couple of feet fro7n the | hase of the  tooth the gum