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and green bays and inlets of corn, till at last they were running up close to the lower spurs of the dividing ranges, and the seven-leagued shadows of the mountains began to stretch across the wide wooded spaces and quiet plains below, and at last the train began to attack the mountain saddle in earnest, supported by one engine in front and one behind. The railroad climbs like a cat over the perpendicular wall of the pass at a great height, and the grandeur of the landscape is almost alarming at the first view. Not so lovely as some of the snow-clad Alpine passes, this summit possesses a strange, forbidding beauty all its own. The same immense mountain sides sheeted with sombre forest, where the white clematis hangs like an avalanche for an instant and then passes out of sight; the same bright rivers, darting like a thing of life far below; the same mysterious glens, and shadow-ridden summits, and purple precipices unroll before the traveller as he winds upwards farther and farther into the inmost hearth and home of the mountains. In the joyous waters of those deep-cut ravines, English trout are thriving, and lose none of their spirit under the shade of the great-crowned tree-ferns and black perpendicular cliffs. There is something lonely, even in the blaze of spring, in these fastnesses;