During that peculiarly bright and lovely summer we often ask each other, Could it have been true that no one knew one mountain from the other, and that hills had been apparently levelled and vallies filled up by the heaviest snow-fall ever known.

But whilst the words were on our lips, we could see a group of palm-trees, ten feet high, with their topmost leaves gnawed to the stump by starving sheep, that must have been standing on at least seven feet of snow to reach them; and there was scarcely a creek on the run whose banks were not strewn, for many a long day, by bare and bleaching bones..