“Confound you!” I cried, for Denny laughed openly at me; and I rushed back to the hall!  But on the threshold I paused—­and said what I will not write.

For, though there came from somewhere just the last ripple of a mirthful laugh, the hall was empty!  Phroso was gone!  I flung the pickaxe down with a clatter on the boards, and exclaimed in my haste: 

“I wish to heaven I’d never bought the island!”

But I did not mean that really.

(To be continued.)

CLIMBING MONT BLANC IN A BLIZZARD.

CAUGHT IN A BLINDING SNOW STORM ON A NARROW CLIFF, TWO AND A HALF
MILES ABOVE SEA LEVEL.

BY GARRETT P. SERVISS,

Author of “Astronomy with an Opera Glass,” “Climbing the Matterhorn,"[15] etc.

[Footnote 15:  See MCCLURE’S MAGAZINE for September, 1895.]

Standing on the spindling tower of the Matterhorn early one August morning in 1894 I saw, for the first time, the white crown of Europe, Mont Blanc, with its snows sparkling high above the roof of clouds that covered the dozing summer in the valleys of Piedmont.  Just one year later I started from Chamonix to climb to that cool world in the blue.

My guide was Ambroise Couttet, whose family name is famous in the mountaineering annals of Savoy.  An earlier Ambroise Couttet lies in the icy bosom of Mont Blanc, fallen, years ago, down a crevasse so profound that his would-be rescuers were drawn, baffled, awe-struck, and with shaking nerves, from its horrible depths, whose bottom they could not find.  Even before that time Pierre Couttet had been whirled to death on the great peak, and his body, embedded and preserved in a glacier, was found nearly half a century afterward at its foot.  And two other Couttets of past years escaped, by the merest hair of miraculous fortune, from a catastrophe on the same dreadful slopes in which three of their comrades were swallowed up.  Yet the Ambroise Couttet of to-day is never so happy as when he is on the mountain.  His eyes sparkle if he hears the thunder of an avalanche, and he smiles as he watches its tossing white crest ploughing swiftly across some snowy incline which he has just traversed.

One porter sufficed, for my only traps consisted of a hand camera, a field-glass, and a few extra woollen shirts and stockings.  Having had no serious exercise since climbing the Matterhorn a year before, I deemed it prudent to spare my strength for the more important work above by taking a mule to the Pierre Pointue.  It was a fine morning, offering a promise of favorable weather after several days of mist and rain.  Monsieur Janssen, the French astronomer, who was waiting at Chamonix for his porters to complete their long and wearisome labor of transporting piecemeal his telescope and other instruments of observation to the summit, before making the ascent himself, said, grasping my arm at parting: