he walked past me, “Look where it points,” and went away.  It was pointing to a stratum halfway up to the summit of one of the aiguilles to the west of the Mer de Glace, a chamois climb.  He told me later that he found the crystals in the couloir that brought them down from that stratum.  A dear old man was Coutet, and fully deserving the affection and confidence of Ruskin.  Connected with him was a story which Ruskin told me there of a locality in the valley of Chamounix, of which the guides had told him, haunted by a ghost which could be seen only by children.  It was a figure of a woman who raked the dead leaves, and when she looked up at them the children said they saw only a skull in place of a face.  Ruskin sent to a neighboring valley for a child who could know nothing of the legend, and went with him to the locality which the ghost haunted.  Arrived there he said to the boy, “What a lonely place!  There is nobody here but ourselves.”  “No,” said the child, “there is a woman there raking the leaves,” pointing in a certain direction.  “Let us go nearer to her,” said Ruskin; and they walked that way, when the boy stopped, saying that he did not want to go nearer, for the woman looked up, and he said that she had no eyes in her head,—­“only holes.”

The valley of Chamounix finally became to me the most gloomy and depressing place I was ever in.  We made excursions and a few sketches; but I had little sympathy with it, though I tried to do what Ruskin wanted, and to get a faithful study of some characteristic subject in the valley.  Every fine day we climbed some secondary peak, five or six thousand feet, and in the evenings we discussed art or played chess, mainly in rehearsing problems, until midnight.  Sundays no work was done, but we used to climb some easy hilltop; and there he spent the afternoon in writing a sermon for a girls’ school in which he was much interested, but not a hue of drawing would he do.  To me, brought up in the severity of Sabbatarianism, the sanctity of the first day of the week had always been a theological fiction, and the result of the contact with the larger world of thinkers and the widening of my range of thought by the study of philosophy had also made me see that the observances of “new moons and fast-days” had nothing to do with true religion, and that the Eden repose of the Creator was too large a matter to be fenced into a day of the week.  This slavery to a formality in which Ruskin was held by his terrible conscience provoked me, therefore, to the discussion of the subject.

I showed him that there was no authority for the transference of the Christian weekly rest from the seventh to the first day of the week, and we went over the texts together, in which study my Sabbatarian education gave me an advantage in argument; for he had never given the matter a thought.  Of course he took refuge in the celebration of the weekly return of the day of Christ’s resurrection; but I showed him that the text does not support the claim that