Page:Selected letters of Mendelssohn 1894.djvu/93

Rh cools you when you are overheated. And then the waterfalls! I have quite a treatise to write to you still on the nature of waterfalls, but to-day there is no time, for now I have a different sort of story to tell. Now, you think, he is just going to descend and find the country below very pleasant. No, that isn’t it; but when I reached the Sennhütte, I heard that in a meadow, right up among the mountains, there was going to be a festival, and now and then one saw people in the distance climbing up. I wasn’t in the least tired, and an Alpine village festival is not to be seen every day. The good weather said, “Yes,” and my guide was immensely pleased at the prospect, so I said then, let us make for Itramen. The old cowherd pushed on, so we had to take manfully to climbing again, for Itramen is a good thousand feet above the Lesser Scheideck. The cowherd was a sort of wild man of the mountains; he rushed on in front of us like a cat. Presently, however, he took pity on my guide, and relieved him of the bundle and cloak; and even with these he still ran ahead so fast that we had no chance of catching him. The path was horribly steep, but he said it was good, and that formerly he used to take a steeper and shorter one. He was about sixty years old, and yet when my young guide and I had struggled up to a hill-top, we invariably saw him disappearing over the next. For two hours we went over the hardest bit of mountain I ever attempted, now high up, now far down again, over loose stones and streams and crevasses, across two snow fields, all in the utmost loneliness without a