“There is no time like the present,” he cried gaily, his tones no longer broken, “as I have always found.” And suddenly, before he ceased, and while they all thronged round me, there came a sharp strange sigh singing through the air, that grew into the wild discordant music of multitudinous echoes, and we all turned and sprang intuitively to see, rent in the moonlight and sheathed in the glorious spray of a thousand ice-falls, the Mount of Sorrow bow its head and come down, and, while the whole earth shook and smoked back in hoar vapours, the great snow-slide, in its swift sheeting splendour, flash and wipe out before our eyes the last timber of the hut and barn and byre of the Rayniers.