The guide said that was nonsense; but she reduced him to silence by quoting a case in point.

She said, too, that if a man slipped and fell, there was nothing to prevent him from going helplessly down a run of ice into a subterranean watercourse, which would carry him for two or three leagues underground; and on this head our boy had no counter-statement to make.

She asserted that without ladders it was utterly impossible to make the descent to the commencement of the glaciere; and she vowed there was no ladder now, nor had been for some time.

Here the boy came in, stating that the cave belonged to a mademoiselle of Neufchatel, who had a summer cottage at no great distance, and loved to be supplied with ice during her residence in the country, for which purpose she kept a sound ladder on the spot, and had it removed in the winter that it might not be destroyed.

There was a circumstantial air about this statement which for the moment got the better of the old woman; but she speedily recovered herself, and repeated positively that there was no ladder of any description, adding, somewhat inconsequently, that it was such a bad one, no Christian could use it with safety.