There were groves, too, rather lower down, of Alpine roses (the first I had come across that year), not the fringed or the green-backed species which botanists love best, but the honest old rust-backed rhododendron, which every Swiss traveller has been pestered with in places where the children are one short step above mere mendicity, but, equally, which every Swiss traveller hails with Medean delight when he comes upon it on the mountain-side.

We were now, too, in the neighbourhood of the first created Alpen rose.

The story is, that a young peasant, who had climbed the precipices behind Oberhausen for rock-flowrets, as the price of some maiden's love, fell at the moment when he had secured the flowers, and was killed.

From his blood the true Alpen rose sprang, and took its colour.
We were now passing along the summit of one of the lower spurs of the Rothhorn range, and making for the peak of the Ralligflue, which lay considerably below us.

In descending near the line of crest, we found a large number of very deep fissures, narrow and black, some of them extending to a great distance across the face of the hill; sometimes they appeared as mere holes, down which we despatched stones, sometimes as unpleasant crevasses almost hidden by flowers and the shrubs of rhododendron.