Moriah. The altar is builded, the unresisting sacrifice is bound, and the loving father's hand is stretched to slay his only son, according to the command of trial, "Take now thy son, thy only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac (thy 'Laughter'), and offer him for a burntoffering," reposing in his unstaggering confidence on the faithfulness of all God's promises bound up in Isaac's being, "that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure" on the third day.

The moment of supreme surrender has come, the swift messenger from heaven withholds Abraham's hand, and rolling away the cloudy veil, reveals the great antitype provided by God for a burnt-offering, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world: "Your father Abraham rejoiced that he should see my day, and he saw it and was glad."

In this wondrous way did the Divine Wisdom educate His servant and friend Abraham, to enter into experimental, sympathetic comprehension of the sacrificial love of the all-Father, who spared not His Son, His only Son, His beloved One, even Jesus, but delivered Him up for us all.

SOME years ago there appeared in one of the humourous weekly papers a drawing of an uneducated but wealthy widow, whose husband had made money in a homely but rapidly lucrative business, calling upon one of our aristocracy. The words below the picture indicated that she was inquiring after the Duke, and that her hostess, the Duchess, had replied that he was in the Dolomites. Mrs. Newly Rich at once expresses her sympathy, adding that her late husband often had such attacks and was anything but pleasant to live with until he got better again.

I do not instance this because I think it an exceptionally rich piece of humour. As I have said, it appeared in one of our comic weekly papers. Neither do I vouch for my verbal accuracy of quotation; but the point of it is, I hope, made apparent. Of course it is not so true now as it was twenty years ago, because our insular ignorance of foreign countries has been considerably modified by the fact that people of very modest means have facilities offered them for getting to all parts of the Continent. Thousands now visit Switzerland every year, a smaller number frequent the Tyrol, and a few get still further to the Eastern end of the Alps to see the beauties of the regions of the Salz Kammergut and the Dolomites. Having, in a previous summer, been charmed by the scenery of the Salz Kammergut, a friend and myself decided last year to have a look at the Dolomites.

After a couple of days in Innsbrück, the clean, prosperous-looking capital of the Austrian Tyrol, we took the train that crosses the magnificent Brenner Pass, and in about seven hours reaches Toblach at the entrance to the Ampezzo Valley. Between Toblach on the Austrian side of the Eastern Alps and Belluno on the Italian side, and only seventy miles distant from Venice, lies a wild, mountainous region, amid which, as yet, no railway intrudes. Though the true Dolomitic peaks lie a little to the west of this, yet from a tourist's point of view the Ampezzo-thal district is the most interesting and accessible, and usually known as the Dolomites.

There is a fine road winding along the valleys, and the seventy miles that it covers is traversed regularly by diligences, whilst those who desire a more comfortable mode of travelling can easily hire carriages. To those who prefer walking there are possibilities of more intimate acquaintance with the charms of this tract of country because they can leave the open road and take to the mountain passes. It was in this wise that my friend and

I intended to travel.

Toblach, though convenient as a starting point, is not an interesting place, but it has the useful quality of possessing a number of good hotels. In one of these we found comfortable quarters for the night and next morning, having filled our rücksacks and arranged for our other luggage to be kept until we returned, we started for Cortina d'Ampezzo, a walk of some twenty miles.

I will not weary you with lengthy descriptions of the country we passed through, for such seldom afford any clear or accurate ideas to a reader's mind. One man will use the same adjectives and expressions in describing our modest Lake district, or the charms of North Wales, that another does in attempting to give his ideas of the grandeur of the Alps or the Pyrenees. Still, this short day's journey is so typical of what we were to meet with, that I would fain try to convey some impression, however

feeble, of the wild and most picturesque scenery we were among. Every turn of the winding road gave us fresh views of towering fantastic rocks, weird-looking bastions of bare, jagged limestone, rising precipitously out of masses of dark trees or springing from slopes of rich green verdure. The effect was at once stupendous and tumultuous. And yet, here and there, nestled some small placid lake as if silently rebuking Nature's disorder. Few of these peaks exceed ten thousand feet in height, and are consequently almost free from snow in the summer. Only in sheltered places can this white covering be seen clinging in huge patches to the steep sides of the mountains. We saw no such majestic sights as Mont Blanc, or the Jungfrau, with the impressiveness of their far-away snow-clad summits. If, for the sake of comparison, we recalled the Swiss Alps, we thought of the isolated Matterhorn. But here what is lacking in solitary grandeur is made up for by the astonishing number and variety of the mountains. Remember, we have not walked nearly twenty miles, yet peak after peak has thrust itself upon our view. We are surrounded on all sides by these gigantic masses of curiously-shaped rock. We might almost be passing through some strange disordered dreamland of an over-excited brain. What heightens this illusion and increases the fascination of these dolomitic limestone peaks is that the stone in process of weathering takes on the most varied shades of colour, from the darkest purple to the most vivid red. Under the evening sunlight the mountains were wont to riot in the whole gamut of the spectrum of colour, predominant among it being what seemed like huge splashes of blood upon their lofty pinnacles. We felt ourselves face to face with Nature in one of her most theatrical moods, where she has painted with a broad brush, using a lavish palette, and crowded her stage with the wildest profusion of scenic effect.

As we near Cortina the mountains recede, the valley opens out and we reach a spot where man has been able to

find soil that he can till, and a river beside which to build himself a town. And in the centre of this little town he has raised a huge Campanile after the style of the one that once adorned Venice. We are still in Austrian territory, but, in the name of the town, and in the presence of this bell tower we have indications of the nearness of the Italian frontier. It is only four miles the other side of Cortina.

One thing we noticed as we passed from Austria into Italy how the musical quality of the names of places and mountains changed. We left behind us such Teutonic sounding villages as Toblach and Schluderbach, and mountains like the Drei Zinnen and Durrenstein, and met with the pleasant melodious names of Caprile, Perarolo, and Belluno, and mountains called Antelao, Cristallo, and Pelmo. And between these were villages and mountains with names that we thought, perhaps somewhat fancifully, were blends of the harsh and the musical, and which came off our tongues with something quaint and distinctly pleasing about them. Cortina itself, for instance, Pieve di Cadore, San Vito, Longarone and the mountain peaks of Sorapis, Tofana, and Pizza Popena. Is there not a curious fascination in the sound of words? even if you know nothing of their meaning, origin, or derivation, though, perhaps, a little digression like this brings me near to the level of the old lady who found so much comfort in the six-syllabled word Mesopotamia.

The weather which had betrayed signs of becoming unsettled next day decided upon rain, and accomplished its purpose in most spirited and demonstrative fashion. It has been alleged that it rains in Manchester, but I have never seen it do so in such a whole-hearted and unrestrained manner as it did at Cortina. We had no alternative to staying indoors. It was annoying, and we could not help a feeling of despondency when we recalled that we had left home in one of the dullest, if not wettest, summers on record, and had found that abroad the weather