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moving shapes and figures, that are curiously lifelike and distinct. The forests of the Selkirks are less desolate, as one sees more birds and beasts, and the vegetation and timber are far more picturesque.

Next morning we tried to climb one of the spurs of Mount Murchison. We had a very bad hour with the logs in the wood, and when we got out into the open above the trees, the weather gave us little encouragement. A tedious shaleslope led up to steep rocks which afforded some interesting scrambles, Woolley manipulating a big jammed stone in a rock-chimney with much skill. We halted for lunch on an arête at a height of about 9000 feet. As the mountains were enveloped in mist and it was snowing steadily, we had no view to speak of, but two remarkable phenomena attracted our attention. The first was a tall column of rock that had become detached from the cliff and formed a slender pillar 400 feet high and tapering towards the summit and base. Much more extraordinary, however, was a group of rocks, formed, as it seemed, of petrified tree-trunks with numerous fossilised remains at their base. In his paper read before the Royal Geographical Society on February 13, Dr Collie presses the opinion that these were really gigantic petrified seaweed. What a tremendous upheaval must have occurred to throw them up here! Nor am I aware of any similar remains having been previously found at so great an elevation.

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The weather steadily got worse, so Collie carefully photographed the petrified trees, and we returned to camp.

Sunday, 4th Sept.-Pushed on up Bear Creek towards the Bow Pass. Violent hailstorms, followed by heavy snow, in which we hopelessly lost the trail through the wood. Camped in slush on the edge of a muskeag. Bitterly cold night, with hard frost. The morning was brilliantly fine, and the sun shone in a cloudless sky. Ice crystals sparkled on every leaf and twig, the pails and buckets were all frozen hard, and Byers asked for time to thaw his socks before he could put them on and give us our breakfast. At the summit of the Bow Pass (6700) we left the trail, and, ascending a hill to the right, had a glorious view of Murchison and the Waputehk Mountains. The most striking of these is the Pyramid (about 11,200), whose eastern face descends in an almost sheer cliff 6000 feet high to the valley. Our camp was pitched on the shore of the Bow Lake, a beautiful sheet of water embosomed in high mountains. It is full of big trout, and the whole district, which is well described in Mr Wilcox's book, can be recommended to people with a taste for camp-life.

On Wednesday, 7th September, we had our last climb. Following the northern shore of the lake, we passed the mouth of a remarkable gorge, with a big jammed stone forming a natural bridge, and reached the foot of the Bow Glacier, which descends from

the great Waputehk ice-field. smaller summits; while over The upper ice - fall proved all was a cloudless sky of more troublesome, and four or five than Italian blue. razor-edged ridges, connected by rickety ice-bridges, and with deep crevasses on either side, gave us the most ticklish piece of mountaineering work which I had during the whole trip. It did not last long, however, and soon we were on the névé of the Waputehk, which, though Mr Wilcox errs greatly when he says that it is much the biggest ice-field in the Rockies, is still a very fine glacier. The surrounding peaks do not exceed 11,000 feet, and are not particularly striking in form. The upper slopes of our peak were covered with fresh snow, and we had a terrible grind before we reached the top. Its height was 10,100 feet, and our view was one of the most remarkable I have ever seen, in respect of the multitude of mountains visible. Beginning southwards in this wonderful panorama, the first peak to catch my eye was Mount Assiniboine, the finest and highest south of the railway; next on the right rose Mount Temple and the Laggan group; the Ottertail mountains, and a group of unknown peaks; the Selkirks, with Mount Sir Donald, seventy miles distant, standing up quite clear; the Gold Range; next, and much nearer, the Freshfield group; Mount Forbes, towering above all competitors; the doublepeaked Mount Lyell, partially obscuring Mounts Bryce and Columbia; Peak Wilson and the Murchison group; then the Slate Range, with innumerable

Having next to no meat, we had been living practically on bread and porridge; but next evening we caught some fine trout in the Bow river, which took a fly readily, in spite of all we had been told to the contrary. Friday the 9th was our last morning in camp, and it afforded us a little mild excitement in the shape of a bear which was sighted on a hill above the camp. Peyto and I went after him; but he got our wind, and was seen by the party in camp to gallop over a range of hills 8000 feet high into the valley of the Blaeberry Creek. Our troubles were not yet over, as the burned timber in the woods above Laggan were worse than anything we had hitherto seen, the fallen trunks piled one upon another presenting a most extraordinary tangle. There were places where we walked on tree-trunks for some hundreds of yards without ever touching the ground. I cannot help thinking that it would repay the C.P.R. authorities to cut a good trail as far as Bow lake, as the district offers many attractions to sportsmen and fishermen as well as to mountain climbers. How the horses got through it all I don't know, as Collie and I dismounted and walked on ahead of the caravan. The distant scream of a C.P.R. locomotive warned us that we were approaching the haunts of men, and at five o'clock we found ourselves once more at Laggan railway station. The outfit

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fying amount of marks. also explained to me that in allotting marks for the answers to the questions in which he asked for views and opinions, he was not influenced by the agreement or non-agreement of the opinions stated with his own views, but judged them entirely by the clearness and ability with which they were stated and reasoned out. He entirely believed that the object of teaching military history, strategy, and tactics was not to cram the minds of our future officers with facts and theories, but to enable them from facts to deduce principles, which would help them when in time to come they would have to think for themselves in situations of difficulty.

I soon learnt that I was in presence of no ordinary mind, but of one which used facts in order to arrive at principles; and in 1869, having undertaken to lecture at the United Service Institution on the Last Campaign of Hanover, I wrote to him for his opinion on certain points, and received in reply that masterly sketch of the spirit of the new Prussian tactics, which is given by Sir William Butler at pages 81-84 of the Life, and of which he says, "It will be allowed that the man who had thus early caught the principles and objects of modern battle tactics possessed a rare power of insight into questions upon which may depend the existence of nations."

In May 1873, at the request of the Council of the United Service Institution, I lectured

on "The Tactics of the Three Arms as modified to meet the requirements of the present day." In the discussion which followed, many of our ablest soldiers and deepest military thinkers took part: Sir Edward Hamley, Sir Patrick M'Dougall, Sir Lintorn Simmons, and some of the finest of the older school, Sir William Codrington, Sir Percy Herbert, and Lord de Ros. Reading the speeches again now, I have no hesitation in saying that by far the ablest and most far-seeing was that by Colonel Colley, which opened the discussion. It is a masterpiece of close and analytical argument. Commencing by showing that only a small part of a force can attempt flank-attacks, and that the great bulk of it must be prepared to attack to its front, or remain inoperative, he proved how superior the new formations must be to the old for such frontal attack. After distinguishing between the formations required for bringing troops into position for the final rush, and those needed for carrying out that rush, he spoke of attack with the bayonet, said that every nation in Europe believed the bayonet to be its special weapon, and continued, in words the truth of which must in the last days and hours of his life have been terribly present in his mind :

"This is merely the expression of the fact that whenever two forces had arrived within a certain distance sufficient morale, sufficient go left in of one another, that one which had it really to wish and try to close, was ipso facto victorious; and that every

my Wild Sheep Valley and Hills, I had an unusually clear view of the mountains to the north, and made a rough but careful sketch of them; and the result of my observations seemed to be that no pass could possibly exist between any of the peaks near the supposed Brown and Hooker by which any four footed animal less active than a goat could cross. The solution of the problem seemed as far off as ever, so after a consultation we we decided to move half the outfit over Wilcox Pass into the Athabasca main valley. This we accordingly did, leaving poor Roy alone to look after the camp.

The Athabasca flows through a wide valley, covered in most places with an ugly wash-out, which we found, however, very convenient for travelling purposes. The general features of the scenery were less attractive than those of the charming vale we had left, though the mountains here were on a bigger scale, and Athabasca Peak nobly filled the head of the valley. We had hoped to find a lateral glen by which we could reach the foot of Mount Columbia; but the mountains slope on their eastern sides in a continuous line of cliffs, intersected only at places by impassable ice-falls. We, therefore, followed the bed of the stream for some miles, and camped at an elevation of 5600 feet near the mouth of a gorge, down which a creek tumbled in

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picturesque cascade. Our men spent the next morning vainly prospecting for gold, and in the

afternoon we took our sleeping-bags and provisions and ascended the gorge, with a view to sleeping out, for some peak of the main range. The stream issued from a glacier descending from a group of mountains with three principal summits, of which the northern one (Diadem Peak) was the curious snow-crowned peak I had seen from Wild Sheep Hills. The central and highest summit was named by Collie after Woolley, and the third after my humble self. Our two peaks appeared to have been sadly misbehaving themselves in bygone ages. A tremendous rock-fall had evidently taken place from their ugly bare limestone cliffs, and the whole valley, nearly half a mile wide, was covered to a depth of some hundreds of feet with boulders and débris. In our united experiences in the Alps, the Himalayas, the Caucasus, and other mountains, we had never seen indications of a landslide on so colossal a scale. Following the edge of the glacier, we bivouacked, our objective next day being Peak Woolley, which we hoped to climb by a steep icefall that separated it from Diadem. I made a delicious bed of heather and pine twigs, and slept soundly till I was awoke by the rain pattering on my sleeping-bag. The weather had changed for the worse, and the pale sickly light of an unpromising dawn had overspread the eastern sky when we started up the glacier. All went well as far as the foot of the ice-fall, when a black cloud that had been gathering over Mount

Columbia burst, and heavy rain drove us to seek shelter under a friendly rock. In five minutes it cleared, and we were just putting on the rope for our ascent of the ice-fall, when with a roar and a clatter some tons of ice that had broken off near the summit came tumbling down, splintering into fragments in their descent. The five minutes' delay had been a lucky one, so we took the friendly hint and left that icefall alone. The only alternative peak was Diadem, which we climbed in about four hours, three rock-chimneys and some steep rocks near the top affording us a certain amount of diversion. The rocks were not particularly difficult, but great care was necessary, owing to their excessive rottenness. The snow crown proved to be 100 feet high, and from its top (11,600) a wonderful panorama burst upon us, in spite of the murky atmosphere. Standing, as we were, on the Great Divide, we looked down upon a marvellous complexity of peak and valley, of shaggy forest and shining stream, with here and there a blue lake nestling in the recesses of the hills. Quite close, as it seemed, the overpowering mass of the supposed Mount Brown (now called Mount Alberta) towered frowning 2000 feet above us. It was a superb peak, like a gigantic castle in shape, with terrific black cliffs falling sheer on three sides. On almost every side, far as the eye could reach, the world of mountains extended: taken individually, I have seen finer peaks elsewhere,

but what impressed me here was a sense of their seemingly endless continuity. Northwards, as was to be expected, the landscape presented a sterner and more forbidding aspect: indeed, the softer and more homely features of Alpine scenery were everywhere absent. One missed the green pastures dotted about with brown châlets, and the familiar tinkle of the cow-bells would have sounded more musical than ever on my ears,-for, as I think Mr Leslie Stephen observes in 'The Playground of Europe,' these evidences of civilisation improve rather than spoil mountain scenery.

Collie's surveying kept us some time at the top, and bitterly cold work it was. We descended the peak through pelting hail, while the thunder roared and rattled among the crags in grand style, so that we were more than once constrained to halt and throw aside our ice-axes for fear of the lightning. In the woods we were struck with a still worse storm, with hailstones as big as-well, of the usual size that hurt as they hit you; and again we ran down into camp like three drowned rats. During the night another thunderstorm, the fifth in twenty-four hours, broke over us; but though the drippings from our leaky tent. soaked my already damp sleeping-bag, I slept soundly through it all.

In the morning we struck the tents and returned over Wilcox Pass to the camp. Provisions were again running short, so we decided to make tracks homewards, and moved

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