when he got to the church-bell —­as Joseph Addison would say.  The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example.  It is still clinging to one or two things which were useful once, but which are not useful now, neither are they ornamental.  One is the bell-ringing to remind a clock-caked town that it is church-time, and another is the reading from the pulpit of a tedious list of “notices” which everybody who is interested has already read in the newspaper.  The clergyman even reads the hymn through—­a relic of an ancient time when hymn-books are scarce and costly; but everybody has a hymn-book, now, and so the public reading is no longer necessary.  It is not merely unnecessary, it is generally painful; for the average clergyman could not fire into his congregation with a shotgun and hit a worse reader than himself, unless the weapon scattered shamefully.  I am not meaning to be flippant and irreverent, I am only meaning to be truthful.  The average clergyman, in all countries and of all denominations, is a very bad reader.  One would think he would at least learn how to read the Lord’s Prayer, by and by, but it is not so.  He races through it as if he thought the quicker he got it in, the sooner it would be answered.  A person who does not appreciate the exceeding value of pauses, and does not know how to measure their duration judiciously, cannot render the grand simplicity and dignity of a composition like that effectively.

We took a tolerably early breakfast, and tramped off toward Zermatt through the reeking lanes of the village, glad to get away from that bell.  By and by we had a fine spectacle on our right.  It was the wall-like butt end of a huge glacier, which looked down on us from an Alpine height which was well up in the blue sky.  It was an astonishing amount of ice to be compacted together in one mass.  We ciphered upon it and decided that it was not less than several hundred feet from the base of the wall of solid ice to the top of it—­Harris believed it was really twice that.  We judged that if St. Paul’s, St. Peter’s, the Great Pyramid, the Strasburg Cathedral and the Capitol in Washington were clustered against that wall, a man sitting on its upper edge could not hang his hat on the top of any one of them without reaching down three or four hundred feet—­a thing which, of course, no man could do.

To me, that mighty glacier was very beautiful.  I did not imagine that anybody could find fault with it; but I was mistaken.  Harris had been snarling for several days.  He was a rabid Protestant, and he was always saying: 

“In the Protestant cantons you never see such poverty and dirt and squalor as you do in this Catholic one; you never see the lanes and alleys flowing with foulness; you never see such wretched little sties of houses; you never see an inverted tin turnip on top of a church for a dome; and as for a church-bell, why, you never hear a church-bell at all.”