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comfort of the new abode consoled them.
It had several divisions.
A sleeping-place for the guides and workmen was partitioned off from a middle room occupied by Agassiz and his friends, while the front space served as dining-room, sitting-room, and laboratory.
This outer apartment boasted a table and one or two benches; even a couple of chairs were kept as seats of honor for occasional guests.
A shelf against the wall and a few pegs accommodated books, instruments, coats, etc., and a plank floor, on which to spread their blankets at night, was a good exchange for the frozen surface of the glacier.1
1 In bidding farewell to the boulder which had been the first ‘Hotel des Neuchatelois’ we may add a word of its farther fortunes. It had begun to split in 1841, and was completely rent asunder in 1844, after which frost and rain completed its dismemberment. Strange to say, during the last summer (1884) certain fragments of the mass have been found, inscribed with the names of some of the party; one of the blocks bearing beside names, the mark No. 2. The account says: ‘The middle stone, the one numbered 2, was at the intersecting point of two lines drawn from the Pavilion Dollfuss to the Scheuchzerhorn on the one part, and from the Rothhorn to the Thierberg on the other.’ According to the measurements taken by Agassiz, the Hotel des Neuchatelois in 1840 stood at 797 metres from the promontory of Abschwung. We are thus enabled, by referring to the large glacier map of Wild and Stengel, to compare the present with the then position of the stone, and thereby ascertain the progress of the glacier since the time in question. Thus the boulder still contributes something toward the sequel of the work begun by those who once found shelter beneath it.— E. C. A.
Houghton, Mifflin and company, New York, Boston, 1885.
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