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914

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HOLIDAY RAMBLES

IN ORDINARY PLACES

BY A WIFE WITH HER HUSBAND

S	4 0 0

REPUBLISHED FROM THE "SPECTATOR'*

LONDON

DALDY, ISBISTER & CO.
56, LUDGATE HILL
1877LONDON:

PRINTED BY VIBTUB AND CO., LIMITED,
CITY EOAD.HOLIDAY RAMBLESi

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ADYEETISEMENT.

A

^ These very slight narratives of holiday travel scarcely
deserve, as their chronicler in each case is well aware,
any less temporary form than that in which they first
appeared. But they have been received with more*
favour than they merited, as all such papers will be
which manage to exhale any real breath of enjoyment,
however common the experiences from which that
enjoyment is derived ; and as the Editors of the
Spectator have kindly consented to their republication,
they are here reprinted in a shape which will render
them, for yet a short time longer, accessible to the
holiday-seeking public, though without any attempt to
give them a more dignified or permanent form than
that of familiar letters. Indeed, it is obvious enough
that any such more dignified form would be quite
inappropriate to sketches of so flimsy a kind.

700004CONTENTS.

I. A Wipe on her Travels. 1867 . . . .	1

(The Engadin—the Bernese Alps.)

II. Rambles op a Working Man in search op Eest . 77
(The Jura—Col de Jaman—Sixt—Col de Breyent—the
Grande Chartreuse.) 1868.

III.	Letters of an Englishwoman in Difficulties . 141

(The Ammergau Play—the Oetzthal and Hochjoch—
the War.) 1870.

IV.	A Holiday in Yorkshire. 1874 .... 209

V. A Summer Driving-Tour. 1875. . . * .241
(Winchester—the New Forest—Stonehenge.)

VI. A Drive in Devonshire. 1876 .	. . .289

(Lyme Eegis and Dartmoor.)A WIFE ON HEK TEAYELS.

BI.

Bale, August 31, 1867.

QIR,—Will you allow a feminine convert to those views
so subtly expounded in your issue of the 24th
August, on the advantages of foreign as compared with
English travel, to occupy a few of your columns at this
dull season of the year, with an account of (I hope) the
complete success of an experiment, for the trial of which
she is indebted to your amusing common-sense and epi-
grammatic illustrations? I certainly had intended till
last Saturday (this day week) to take my husband only to
Margate or Ramsgate for a few weeks, which I thought,
before your paper appeared, a very much more sensible
and economical mode of recruiting for a family not very
much burdened with means, than the more expensive one
of foreign travel. There would have been, further, this
advantage about the plan,—that I should not have been
obliged to leave my little ones, who, though strong
enough in health, are but too likely to get into scrapes
when my eye is removed. My eldest is a great romp of
between nine and ten, whom I cannot cure of the habit of
rushing out of our back gate for a frolic on our common,
where she is by no means so popular as I could wish, as4

A WIFE ON HER TEA VELS.

she is a wild thing with a good deal of mischief in her,
and disposed to play tricks with those against whom she
takes an aversion. My second is a little trot of four, who
has a slight tendency to croup, which, as you know, is a
very anxious complaint, and never more dangerous than
in the summer. My youngest, Colin, is only three, but
full of noise and spirits, and apt to weary out the care of
even the kindest of attendants. Still, I know that my
first duty is to my husband, and poor Edward, who has, I
think, been breaking a little of late, seemed to take the
suggestion of Margate with so much resignation, and
so little sign of enjoyment, that I had been a little uneasy,
even before I read your impressive paper, as to the cor-
rectness of my usually sound judgment. Luckily for me,
good Mrs. Shrimpaty, whose lodgings I had written to
engage, had both her first floor and ground floor engaged,
and as we sat at breakfast on that memorable Sunday
morning, the 25th August, Edward, I am sorry to say,
had to wait for his second cup of tea while I was
absorbed in your opportune paper. Edward's leave was
to commence the next day, and it certainly grieved me to
see him look so limp, as it were, and spiritless at the
thought of our sixth visit to Margate;—he had jaundice
there as a child, which he always says was due to the
mingled smell of shrimps and Dunn's penny chocolate
[" requires no boiling; one pennyworth will make a
♦breakfast cup of the finest flavour; as a sweetmeat for
children, it is wholesome and nutritious "], and I fear he
contracted some dislike to the place, which he never
expresses, however, in any form but resignation, and nowA WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

5

and then a word or two in favour of Dover, which. I won't
hear of, on account of the dangerous cliffs for' our little
ones. So, as I poured out his second cup of tea, I said,
"What do you say, dear, to going to Switzerland this
year, as Mrs. Shrimpaty cannot have us, and leaving the
little ones, under our good Hannah's care, at home?
There is your friend W., of the Alpine Club, would tell
you where to go; only I won't have you going into dan-
gerous places, and falling into crevasses, or down preci-
pices, or anything of that sort. "What do you say?"
Then, Sir, I saw the real weight of your argument. Poor
Edward, who had been looking as if the change from
Wandsworth to Margate were something like the change
from cold mutton to water gruel, immediately brightened
up, and was, indeed, transfigured, for the moment, into
his old self. He suggested, faintly, " Do you think, dear,
you could bear to leave the little ones for five weeks ? "
To which I returned a manful rather than a strictly true
answer (for at that moment the Swiss abysses, glaciers,
and crevasses seemed to be swallowing me up from my
little ones, and I was, as Mr. Carlyle says, "shooting
Niagara" with a very dubious feeling indeed as to that
suggestive "and after?" of his). Then Edward began
discussing possible routes so eagerly that I felt sure, Sir,
your remarks were full of truth and wisdom, at least for
the male sex. I can't say that even yet I am a convert
on my own account. But men are curious, fanciful
creatures, and require a good deal of study and manage-
ment, and I am convinced women would understand them
better than they do, if they would read more of what6

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

they say for themselves in the newspapers when they
are quite unembarrassed by domestic considerations.

However, Sir, I have given you preface enough. My
object is to verify your remarkable exposition by showing
in detail what it has been that has seemed to freshen poor
Edward up so much, so I will not tell you of my many
injunctions to Hannah, my bitter parting with the little
ones, our mulligatawny soup at Charing Cross, or of our
rapid journey to Folkestone, but will begin with the time
when we touched foreign soil. Edward, who has been
anything but himself for weeks, had rather relapsed after
the first stimulus of settling a Continental journey, and
he met a friend in the railway to Folkestone who would
talk to him of administrative reform, just what the head
of his department is always boring him with whenever
he sends for Edward to verify a doubtful item in the
accounts. So administrative reform made my husband
look duller than ever. But he had scarcely touched shore
when he began snuffing, and said, " Ah ! this is delight-
ful ; there is that close, perfumed scent again which one
almost always smells in foreign cities, and never in
England. I wonder do they spice the streets ? " I said
I perceived it, but did not much like it. " No more do
I," he replied, " in itself. But it's very delightful, for all
that." Then, as we went to the railway, we saw two
little dumpy French girls, with blue shawls over their
white jackets, and nothing particular on their heads—
such figures"!—trotting on before us into one of the
Boulogne shops, where they appeared to reside. Edward
was enchanted. " What grotesque little figures ! " heA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.

7

said. Grotesque they were, indeed, as grotesque as gar-
goyles, and there was an end of the matter. But Edward
was already beginning to verify that remarkable saying
of yours, that it is something if you only have " the
gutters in a different place." His walk, latterly so
listless, began to resume its old jerky movement. I
pressed for the source of his pleasure in everything
foreign, for I was determined to verify your philosophy
as well as your result, if I could, and must have said, I
suppose, in something like "Wordsworth's words,—

" There surely must some reason be
Why you would change sweet Liswyn farm
For Kilve by the green sea,"

—for he was as obstinate as little Edward Wordsworth,
and would only reply with a laughing reference to these
lines, which I had forgotten, accompanying them by a
sort of elderly caper, and parodying

" At Kilve there was no weathercock,—

And that's the reason why,"

into,—

At home there were no perfumed streets,—
And that's the reason why.

I could see he was already drinking in a tonic that I fear
shrimps and Margate jetty would have failed to give. So
I sighed a deep inward wish that Hannah might not be
letting the little ones go to bed in a draught that hot
evening, and declared to myself that after all I had done
right. When they brought us a fowl and vin ordinaire,
and salt without salt spoons, in the Boulogne restaurationy8

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

before the train left for Paris, Edward was gayer and
more dogmatic than I had seen him for months. I had
provided myself with private salt, for the only time I
was ever abroad before, when I went with my dear sister
Sophy and Mamma to Prague and Dresden, a year
before I was married, neither Sophy nor I could eat our
dinners for the horrid spectacle of salt in a state of com-
plete liquefaction,—the liquefaction being due to the
moisture on scores of knives plunged into it by voracious
Germans, after reiterated previous immersion in that
natural cavity which they call their Mund. (E. says
Mund, from immundus, like lucus a non lucendo, at which
an Englishman near laughed very much, but I had to
have it explained to me.) Edward was not sorry for my
private salt, but said his " heart bounded " at the sight
of the nasty public stuff, at which expression your great
"gutter" illustration came back to me very forcibly
indeed.

However, I must not linger so much, or how shall I
ever get you to Bale, which is, they tell me, at least five
hundred miles from my little darlings, and nearly five
days in time from our start ? Neither of us had ever
been in Paris, and even I was as pleased as Edward
at the pretty shops in the Rue Rivoli, at the pleasant,
neat, dressy air of all the shopwomen, at the vivacity of
every face we met, at the gay Tuileries gardens, with
the bright tubs of orange-trees and splendid gladioles—
we saw an old priest there enjoying like a child the
spectacle of a bird-enchanter who called sparrows and
pigeons round him in flocks at will, and made them perchA WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

9

on his finger; and the old priest smiled at us, and we
smiled at the old priest, and we felt quite happy together
—at the Parisians eating their breakfasts, and drinking
their coffee, in the streets outside the shop doors, at the
brilliant jewellers' shops and dear little brooches, some of
them like little daisies, costing only a franc, and in as
good taste as if they were worth a guinea, and at the
sweetest little embroidered neck ribbons you ever saw,
some of the prettiest only a couple of francs each, which I
thought old Lady Waldegrave might have very grace-
fully distributed to her Cumberland girls after that
lecture of hers on cheap finery, on which you commented
so admirably a few weeks ago. Why, such a neck ribbon,
with the daisy brooch I have spoken of, would be a pretty
ornament for a princess, and not an ambitious or vulgar
one for a village girl. In fact, we were delighted with
everything in Paris except the Exhibition, which as far as
it was good we did not understand, and as far as we
understood it—the showy, glaring, amusing part—was as
vulgar and as unlike Paris as anything could be. I can't
say that our countrymen in Paris were a pleasing spec-
tacle, though they were nevertheless really entertaining
now and then. I overheard two who had just arrived in
Paris discussing how many meals they had had since
leaving England, and their merits. The triumph of one
of them over his companion for not having lunched in
Amiens, where the peas, said the former, had been very fine,
was almost insolent; and the mixture of regret, and self-
respect, and the air of having deserved success, though
without achieving it, with which the other old gentlemanA WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

replied that lie was not hungry at Amiens, and had
therefore "only" eaten a piece of sweet cake without
wanting it, and could do no more, was quite a new study
in modest self-assertion. My husband said that even his
countrymen were new to him ; seen thus, in the midst of
another nation, they were as different as a mounted
painting from the same painting before it is mounted;
or, he said, raising his image, they stood out in strong
relief "against the brighter sky of foreign manners,"
which I thought was doing a little more than justice to
foreign manners; but I knew it must be due to the
champagne of thorough change working in these mer-
curial men's heads.

From Paris we came to Bale in one day, and, tame as
was the scenery to that which we hope to see, I remember
nothing more lovely in its way than the pretty valley of
Bar-sur-Aube, and the winding little green Aube, which
we passed about the middle of our journey, in the very
heart of France. But Edward said it was just like one
of the green streams in Wales, and he cared more for the
quaint little towns and new manners. At Vesoul we
were offered one of those "hat (hot) meals" in bad
English and conical baskets to which one of your corre-
spondents has recently referred, and which are described
in Mugby Junction; but, as far as I can hear, Vesoul is
nearly the only railway station on the Continent which
has reached this stage of civilisation. I was quite sorry
I was not hungry enough for dinner, for I saw after-
wards that Edward had evidently longed both physically
and morally for this new species of refreshment, andA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	u

when a bashful German who had ordered one, and who
supposed that so much as one basket contained, must be
meant for division amongst us all, requested us to fall
to, the disappointment with which my husband replied
that the whole wicker cone was intended for the Ger-
man's own private and particular consumption was quite
moving. There were four courses, fish, fowl, chop, and
dessert, with a bottle of wine and a bottle of water, and
all for three francs. The delighted diner called his feast
" ganz erhaben," " quite sublime," and E., who had been
watching him voraciously through the dwindling pile,
turned to me and, pointing out three old washerwomen
who were beating the clothes of their district with stones
in the stream that ran by the railway, began moralising
on the curious contrast of the two extremes of civilisation,
—the savage want of ingenuity which beats soft linen
with stones, and the elevated thought which invented for
hungry railway passengers those elegant wickerworks of
grateful viands, and which uses the telegraph to get as
many of these pyramids of nutrition prepared for the
train's arrival as there are passengers with appetites equal
to the occasion. Before we got to Bale even I was sorry
that we had not had a " hat meal" between Yesoul and
Lure. But appetite will never consent to forecast its
wants. Here we are at last, with the great Rhine racing
past our windows with the force of a torrent, and the
lights of the hotels flashing in its broad waters, in the
very place where that shillyshally Alice Yavasour first
fell away from her allegiance to John Gray, and induced
Mr. Trollope to ask us all whether we could forgive her.12	A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.

Stuff and nonsense about forgiving ! But why didn't the
tiresome thing know her own mind P

You will never print my letters, even in Septemberj
if I run on like this, and as I wish to give a lesson to
wives, I must stop for the present. I suppose it wouldn't
be a pleasant change to you to spend Sunday at Wands-
worth with my little ones, and tell me how Hannah
manages. (My lock of Colin's hair is already, as Lord
Houghton beautifully observes, " blistered by repeated
tears; " but that won't move you.) I wish the whim
might take you, as then I should be not only an admiring
reader, but doubly grateful,—grateful in a second capa-
city, as well as in that of,—

A Wife on Her Travels.II.

Natjders, Tyrol, September 7, 1867.

QIR,—Edward is growing a beard. I am sure lie
wouldn't have done this at Margate, and it is one
of the set-offs against foreign travel that I don't think
you have made proper allowance for. A beard is
picturesque, I dare say, and all that, like the pine
woods—excuse the local illustration—towards the top
of a pass, but I think it is rather appropriate to patriarchs
and brigands, and that kind of person, than to decent
civil servants with a young family and fanciful superiors
in any of Her Majesty's Offices. I have known a beard
passed over] as suggesting unbusinesslike associations,
when very inferior men with clean-shaven chins have been,
promoted. Besides, beards are scrubby, and in early stages
very frightful. Edward didn't dare begin it till he left
Paris, and at Schaffhausen the other day, as we were
leaving the hotel in an Einspanner,—unassuming one-
horse vehicle, adapted for two persons and two-thirds,—
a waiter who observed the situation politely suggested
that he might perhaps wish to have himself shaved
(" Der Herr mochte vielleicht sich rasiren lassen")
before starting. Edward blushed, and hastily got intoi4	A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.

the jEinspanner, and I could see for a day or two after
that lie looked uneasily into the glass, and would have
hurried its growth if he could. This is what comes of
cutting yourself loose from social restraints. In Mrs.
Shrimpaty's front parlour he would never have had
courage to let his beard grow, and I am sure I don't
know whether I shall ever shame him out of it again. I
suppose it's no use trying at present. Perhaps when he
sees his little family again, and he hears Hannah exclaim,
" Laws, Mum ! how odd master do look! " and bethinks

himself of the observations at the--Office, he will

have it shaved off. Talking of Hannah, how I do long to
hear of my darlings! Edward says I may to-night.
But it is a week since I left home, and we have only just
reached the first place I told Hannah to write to. With
telegraph all the way too,—I have never lost sight of
the wires,—it seems almost cruel.

Well, at Bale we stayed a day to lay in our English
Tauchnitzes, which Edward says he never fails to do in a
journey abroad. I am ashamed to say I got a lot of
novels of a trashy description. Edward chose Kinglake's
" Crimean War," which he had never properly read, and
Warren's " Diary of a Late Physician," over both of which
he pished and pshawed all the rest of our journey, and,
with regard to the latter, abused the last generation for
thinking so well of it. As to the other, he said Mr.
Kinglake could not be natural, and was always on his
literary stilts, I asked for the day's rest at Bale, and
was sorry afterwards that I had, for when you have once
enjoyed the rush of the great river, by daylight and byA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	15

night, and walked over the pretty, quaint bridge to Klein-
Basel, and meandered a little about the town, there is
not much else to see ; and when you have nothing home-
like about you, I think the excitement of some little
change every day is almost necessary. I found a little
in embarking largely in household brushes (I have a
weakness for brushes), which I lighted upon in a little
shop in the town, and thought nice and cheap. Our
portmanteau is apoplectic in consequence. But Edward
was not enthusiastic about the brushes and had time to
get hipped. Besides, as we had heard that the attendance
at the principal Rhine inn had lately become bad and
supercilious, Edward had taken me to one of the others
on the Rhine, where we were very comfortable in other
respects, and had a beautiful room with a view over the
river; but the two beds were secreted in a windowless
alcove or deep cave, in the extreme recesses of which you
could only see the light, even at midday, like a star in
the distance, " on the glimmering limit far withdrawn."
The consequence was that the air was very oppressive
there, and though we opened both windows till the
rushing of the Rhine made me dream that the pipes had
burst at home and my little Colin was washed off his bed,
Edward woke the second morning giddy and sick, and so
ill altogether, that I thought of sending for a German
doctor, and writing you a letter of reproachful expostula-
tion. It was partly owing to his taking coffee, which he
tried because these Germans make it better than tea,
and which never suits him. Luckily I had taken the
precaution to bring with me two pounds of good 4s. 6d.16	A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.

tea (North's), and Edward, having dictated to me enough
German to make the good-natured German chambermaid
au fait at the situation, I obtained means to make him a
good cup of tea, and carried it to him in the recesses of
that dim retreat. Not, indeed, that that said chambermaid
felt any delicacy about conversing with him directly on
the subject of his ailment. I had scarcely finished my
learnt sentences, when she rushed into the cave and
opened an unreserved interchange of views with him on
the stomach and its maladies. I thought to myself that
German chambermaids rush in where Hannahs fear to
tread. But really I am forgetting our journey in all
these little drawbacks. A good cup of tea, and some
very weak preparation, believed to be dilute veal broth,
set Edward sufficiently up to leave in the afternoon.
I did not wish to have him sleeping another night in
that excavation. Before we left, Edward pointed out
to me in the great book the names of two old Miss
B/s, who, with their brother, were " arrives d'Avignon,"
and (oh !) " partis pour Pontresina, Engadin," just where
we are going. Edward turned pale, and murmured
something about wishing for the wings of a dove. The
truth is, they are scientific ladies (they have a gyroscope!)
and dreadfully friendly,—persons who will go into the
geology of a district, its religious history, its political
constitution, its sanitary arrangements, anything but its
beauty. I comforted him, and hoped *we should miss
somehow. But the omen was fatally true.

However, when we got into the train for Schaffhausen
Edward cheered up, and began making lively observationsA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	17

on the Badenserinnen, who got in and out of the train in
the oddest head-dresses you ever saw. Black-ribbon
horns they were. I suppose the ribbons were stiffened
out with some wire framework; for they stuck out like
horns behind each ear,—what the Old Gentleman would
wear if he were in mourning. Edward asked a fat old
lady in the carriage if they were always worn so,
%and always black, and she replied in the affirmative.
Certainly one of the ugliest head-dresses I ever saw ! but
they did Edward good. He said it showed such nice,
modest feeling to put such frightful erections into
mourning, and that English hid^ousness of that kind is
usually flaming yellow or red. The Rhine, on our right
as we went towards Schaffhausen, was one long rapid,
and very beautiful. If our tickets had not been taken
to Schaffhausen, and our little Koffer irrecoverable till
we got there, I think we should have stopped at Laufen-
burg, where the great Rhine narrows almost to a brook,
and rushes with tremendous violence between two rocks
scarcely five yards apart. On each rock is the quaintest
little grey tower; and a covered bridge, such as is so com-
mon and pretty in Switzerland, connects the towers. The
brown hills behind, with young green vineyards creeping
up them, were most picturesque and tempting. But we
had given a pledge to society, in the shape of our yellow-
red Koffer, that we would go as far as Schaffhausen;
and we went. Before we got there Edward's veal broth
was all assimilated, and his stomach crying out for
dinner, but, as the authoress of "Emilia Windham" some-
where finely observes, " ere that haven could be reached

ci8

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

some time must elapse." Not knowing the geography
clearly, we passed the great falls in the railway, and then
had to drive back in an open carriage oyer a great hill to
the pleasant hotel where we were to sleep. What a drive
that was!—through the myriad stenches of Schaffhausen,
a town which in variety and subtlety of offensive smells
seems a young and active rival to Cologne, past the old
fortress, across the picturesque wooden bridge, mounting
through the orchards and vineyards till the roar of the
Rhine rapids above the falls became as soft a sound as a
wind in the trees, and the foam only caught the eye here
and there like a gleam of sunshine, and then rattling
down again at a speed that, in spite of the drag, made me
cling to Edward's hand, and calculate mentally the chance
of ever seeing my home in Wandsworth again safe and
sound. I spare you the falls at Schaffhausen. I could
never be as eloquent as the guide-book, and we were so
disgusted with all the photographs they wanted to sell us,
that it would be inconsistent in me to make a weak copy
in words of what light itself paints so badly. I went
under the falls after dinner in a mackintosh, provided for
the occasion by a man who lets them out, and with my
little umbrella up; but it made me shiver to feel the
slight wooden platform on which we stood tremble beneath
the incessant shock of those tons on tons of dazzling, deli-
cate spray. Next day we crossed under the falls, and
back again above the falls, and got them as thoroughly
into our poor weak little imaginations as we are ever
likely to do, and then returned back over the hills to
Schaffhausen, where the smells would give Mr. HanselA WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

(Edward says) his best idea of the true Infinite, as dis-
tinguished from the Indefinite, and took the railway to
pretty little Constance, whence the steamboat carried us
to Rorschach. The Lake of Constance itself is rather a
delusion. It is so wide, and its banks so flat, that the
whole effect is tame. Still the heavy, low boats, with
their single towering sail, which when the sun is on it
looks like a pillar of light advancing over the lake, are
exceedingly picturesque; and we enjoyed our passage,
though not sorry to see Rorschach. But though not sorry
to see, we were, alas ! to smell it. Schaffhausen we only
fled through, but in Rorschach we abode during the hours
of darkness,—-hardly of sleep. The difficulty was whether
to keep the windows open or shut. When shut, the smell
from within, as of an invalid room badly tended, rushed
in overpoweringly from inside. When open, the streets
sent up the rich steam of emptied slop-pails, which the
inhabitants freely throw out,—the waggons rattled past
with deafening roar,—a little cur barked continuously all
night, and the only soothing sound was the low plash of
the lake on its banks. Edward preferred to cut short the
anguish by rising at five and getting away, which we did,
catching an early train which took us a short way up the
Rhine Yalley to Oberried, where we got out in order to
strike off to the Arlberg Pass into the Tyrol. The mists
were rising hopefully from the great dark-green moun-
tains, as we got into the post carriage in which we were
to cross the Austrian frontier. They floated us omnibus
and all across the full, turbid, yellow Rhine in a ferry
boat, and then we " declared " our two pounds of tea atA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.

the Austrian frontier, and then I fell asleep,—I find fine
scenery very soothing,—while Edward strained his eyes
for the first patch of Alpine snow, which he found as we
approached Feldkirch, but very kindly did not disturb my
slumbers to show it me.

Dear me! how shall I describe our feelings, when we
reached Feldkirch, to see the two old Miss B.'s coming
down-stairs with broad hats and alpenstocks, such frights!
They fell upon us at once. Theirs were what Mr.
Swinburne calls—

" The hands that cling, the feet that follow,"

—for all four hands were held out to us. " My dear Mr.
and Mrs. C., who would have thought of finding you
here? I thought you always went to the sea-kide. A
most delightful region indeed!—have you noticed the
fossil crustacea of the rocks here ? Melisina intends to
read a report on them before the British Association next
year—too late, you know, for this. Melisina and I are
going forward alone to-day towards the Engadin. Henry
has been pedestrianising in France, and has really got
the skin so much off his face that he needs a little rest;
but you will bring him on with you, won't you now ? So
pleasant for Henry! We are quite glad to have a little
attempt at travelling without escort. At our age, you
know, we may venture it, and to-day is such a fortunate
day for the Alpine flora, that we can't delay for poor
Henry. Have you obtained yet the Grnephalium Leonto-
podium ? No ? Ah ! just come from Schaffhausen ? Of
course not. Well, good bye, au revoir, au revoir ! TakeA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	21

care of Henry. He won't mind seeing you, though the
skin is all off his nose. The Black Eagle, Schwarzer
Adler—you know, at Landek. Don't forget to observe
the break in the conformable succession of the lower beds
of the Arlberg." Edward was furious. " I wish," he said,
" there may be a break in the comfortable succession of
their beds, and that they mayn't trouble us any more.
Your friend, the Spectator, says that it is something to
have even the gutter in a different place. Their gutter is
just where it was, and overflowing with the same muddy
science. Did I come to Switzerland for this?" We
fled the Saal for fear of encountering " Henry "; „ and
before dinner had such a lovely walk up through thfe
vineyards to a little garden of mountain meadow-land,
full of cistuses, wild barberries, ranunculuses, and all the
sweetest wild flowers, and with it the grandest view of the
old brown Rhine Mountains, flecked with snow. I could
have stayed there for ever. But the inexorable stomach
brought us down again somewhat soothed to the table
d'hote, and there was " Henry," a piteous sight, indeed,—
the skin curling in small white curl-papers from his nose
in a way that made him so conscious that he had to apolo-
gize. I said, " Oh, Mr. B., you should have a blue veil
like mine. My sister (who married the Honourable Mr. M.,
you know, one of the principal members of the Alpine
Club) warned me not to come abroad without a blue veil,
and I see now from your case that she may be right.
Hitherto it has been only a worry to me." Well, we had
to travel with good Mr. B. He was very great on the
primary schools in France and Switzerland, and the22

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

mischievous results of the harmless little idolatries of the
Tyrol; but, after all, he was better than Melisina and
Theodora. "When we had deposited him with them again,
and extemporized a different route from theirs, up they
came again one night at tea at Pfunds, and we never had
a more embarrassed meal. Nobody knew whose victuals
were whose, and as there was a scarcity, it was really
embarrassing. Melisina had a fearful appetite, and as we
had engaged the only chicken to be had that night,
Edward scarcely liked eating it under her hungry eyes,
and throwing her back upon eggs, which we had every
reason to believe were a little musty. This sad rencontre
threw Edward materially back. The fine Arlberg Pass,
with its tier on tier of wild valleys, and its pink rhodo-
dendrons, and blue gentians yet in blow, had scarcely
done him any good. We nearly lost our mail carriage
because Edward would be obstinate in finding (or rather
losing) our way for us up the zigzags on foot. He
insisted on following the telegraph-wires (which led us
right at last, no doubt, but through such bogs, and
up such steep, wind-breaking climbs), instead of the line
of passengers ! Just as we regained our mail omnibus it
began to rain heavily, and then down we went, first
through a wild storm of rain, then through the darkening
night, great mountains looming through the twilight, and
the stream beside roaring a pleasant music, till after
thirteen hours' journey we reached Landek, tired, but
after a day only alloyed by the worthy EE|nry B.'s
presence.

I musn't weary you with the bit of Tyrol we haveA WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

23

seen. It is very lovely. We had such a climb yesterday
to Stands, a little Tyrolese village 500 or 600 feet above
Landek, where there was a little church with little quaint
pictures on all the tomb-stones, generally intended, in the
case of ehrsame fathers and mothers, to give an idea of
how many babies they had had,—the said babies being
always painted oval, all of the same size, and ranged in a
row like owls sitting on perches, often to the number
of nine or ten, as if the erhsame Mutter had had ten at
a birth, like a retriever. In the case of tugendsame
Jungfrauen, the oval shape (enlarged) was still pre-
served by bringing the feet very close together, and
making the young woman broad at the hips; but some-
times the Jungfraus were in the air, like angelic visions.
What a view that was from Stands up the three valleys!
But you would hate me; and score out the " copy," if I
attempted to describe. We travelled "extra post" up
the Inn valley to this lovely place; and travelling " extra
post" is dignified, pleasant, and on the whole cheap.
Extra post is having a post carriage (Zweispanner, two-
horse carriage) all to yourself, which is changed at every
station, at a fixed tariff. It is not everywhere you can
do it, and when you do meet a tired, wayfaring friend, as
we did once, you can give him a lift without inconvenience
to yourself, and it may be not without reward. The
grateful man in question bestowed on Edward a leathern
Alpine cup, which has already been invaluable to us
in our bright, thirsty little walks.

But I must break off. The post has just brought me a
delightful account of my little darlings. But that im-H

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

pertinent Hannah said they were all better and quieter
for not being so much petted and spoiled. " Pleas, ma'am,
they all eat harty, and Colin sleep very good in my
room, and I take them a walk every day on the common;
and yesterday that naughty R. [the eldest] run into the
pond and get all wet and dirty." Well, it might have
been worse. You, Mr. Editor, were never so thankful
for the arrival of a missing article,—" copy," I think you
call it,—late on a Friday, as I for this first welcome news
of my darlings, bless them ! —I am, Sir, &c.,

A Wife on Her Travels.III.

PoNTRESisrA, September 14, 1867.

OIR,—I didn't like to let Mamma and Sophy know,
for they both dote on me, and it would have
frightened them so, but the truth is, I was stoned in
Nauders. You may well say that the change of associa-
tions and ideas is complete when you get abroad. But I
don't like it quite so complete as this, and have had a
bad opinion of the barbarism of the Jews ever since I
had this practical experience of their favourite judicial
sentence. Well I know you, who induced me to go
abroad, will feel the responsibility painfully, so I hasten
to relieve you. It was only the population under ten
years of age which rose up against me. The little boys
of Nauders solicited Edward for kreutzers, which he, in
the most courtly and cultivated German, declined to give.
I regret to say that the little boys of Nauders thereupon
began mimicking his highly educated accent, and fol-
lowed us in what may be called a " corps of observation "
on our walk. When they found me detached from the
main body, they took up stones and sent a shower after
me, one of these inexpensive, but dangerous, missiles
hitting me on the back of the head. Luckily the slight20

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

but elegant wreath, round my straw hat broke the force
of the blow, which, being delivered by an urchin of nine,
was not perhaps of the most formidable kind. I called
to Edward, who pursued this light infantry with a stick
—I need not say in vain. He then, remembering, Sir,
your impressive lessons on the much greater power of
moral than physical force (which struck him the more
vividly at the moment, because physical force was want-
ing), appealed to public opinion in the shape of a friendly
washerwoman. Having detailed the outrage, this excel-
lent person made some very impressive theological remarks
on the mystery attaching to the problem why der liebe
Gott sent such ill-disposed urchins into this " beautiful
world"—a mystery which, in spite of my alarm and
annoyance, certainly did seem to me a moral octave or
two above the occasion. The good woman, however, then
took the more practical measure of shrieking threats
after the little mob, which had a visibly greater effect
than Edward's stick. You see, she was probably ac-
quainted with their mothers, and might so have exercised
a moral influence on their evening rations. Apart from
the stones above, and stones below—(the cobbled stones
of foreign streets are to me amongst the greatest trials
of foreign travel; how my sister Sophy and I used to
suffer from it at Nuremberg ! but darling Sophy had a
great fortitude and stoical equanimity)—I shall never
forget that walk above Nauders as long as I live! We
went out that I might make a little sketch for Edward of
a great ragged mountain opposite, seamed with snow in
every furrow, and with a spine that I think must haveA WIFE ON HER TEA VELS.	27

been as horrid as that Caucasian one on which Prome-
theus was hung out. I am not a great painter, but have
some feeling for colour, and perhaps a sketch or two of
mine now and then has been thought a little Turneresque.
Well, I didn't satisfy myself at all that day with my
great subject, but Edward, who was ranging up and down
with his usual restlessness while I sketched, suddenly
became excited, drew out his travelling glass, shifted his
position, and at last insisted on my leaving my drawing
to come with him and look down the valley from a rather
higher point. The clouds were lifting, and the great
Orteler was just beginning to gleam out, filling up the
end of the valley like a tall, pale, mountain phantom.
In another quarter of an hour what a change! The
yellow setting sun just caught the towering pile of the
Orteler glacier, and turned it in a moment to shining
gold. It was fifteen miles off, and looked like an appari-
tion from another world. It must have been such a sight
as that which gave rise to the dreams of Delectable
Mountains and golden cities, in vain search for which
men would spend their lives. The green valley at our
feet, speckled with yellow harvest-fields, the dark pine
woods on the mountain-sides, the dead white of the snowy
ridges near us, which were not in sun—the sun was
hidden behind them—and, closing the long valley, this
pyramid of dazzling gold, whence lit up we could not
see, made me whisper to myself that fine outbreak of
Mr. St. John's in " Jane Eyre " in taking leave of his wild
Yorkshire moor, " And I shall see it again, in dreams
when I sleep by the Ganges; and, again, in a remoter28	A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.

Lour, when a deeper sleep overcomes me, by the side of
a darker stream." It was indeed a glimpse to haunt one
all one's life. It comes to me suddenly sometimes when
I wake at night, or even amidst the gibbering of the hot
table d'hote here, and I wonder if it was I who saw it
or somebody else. It was the sort of vision which makes
idealists.

For my part, I wonder nobody sets up one of the great
hotels at Nauders—though I heartily hope nobody will—
for it is impossible to conceive a grander and lovelier
place. The valley opens out there wide enough for
beauty, and the three diverging glens—that down the
Fmstermiinz Pass, that up the Inn (the Engadin), and
that up the Stille Bach (" the Still Brook," about as
" still," by the way, as my little Colin) towards the
Stelvio—are much grander than " such beings as we
are" have the power to take in. As it is, however,
Nauders is a rough place. The infant population stone
you, and the adult population wash your husband's shirts
so as to look like rough-dried huckaback towels, and give
you tea-soup instead of tea. I confess it did go to my
heart to see the state in which North's excellent 4s. 6d.
tea came out at that inn. A teapot was not to be found,
and they gave us something without any strainer in the
spout, and water that didn't boil. The result was a dilute
vegetable hardly possible to drink. When the little maid
made her exit with " Ich wiinsche Ihnen guten Appetit "
(" I wish you a good appetite "), Edward said, " She may
well wish us that! this is an eatable, not a fluid; and I
never had the appetite that would have been requisite toA WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

29

consume it." Nor shall we easily forget the condition
in which a trout was brought up there for breakfast. I
suppose it had been half baked. Anyhow, it was livid
and tumbled, and the sight was too much for us. Still,
we were fed very respectably on the whole, but I wouldn't
recommend fastidious people to stay there. Dear Amelia,
for instance (my youngest sister—she has a beautiful
manor and park of her own at Castle Browside), would
be miserable there.

Well, it was hard to leave JNauders, in spite of the
rough fare, but we did after a day or two,—in an
Einspanner—which, to my surprise, immediately dived
with us down about 1,000 feet to Martinsbriicke, on the
Inn. Nauders is in the valley of the Stille Bach, and
near 1,000 feet above the valley of the Inn, which we had
seen a dizzy depth beneath us, as we wound up to
Nauders through that grand Finstermiinz Pass, a day or
two before. I never saw a grander road. It is a military
road made by the Austrians on the side of the mountain,
with 800 feet of precipice beneath and very likely 800
feet above it. They were so jealous of it in 1860 that an
English artist was arrested for sketching it, and wrote
out a piteous and almost lyrical effusion on the subject—
he lost his dinner by the arrest, and a good one, he says
—in the guest-book at our little hotel, whereupon other
and later guests had insolently made fancy pen-and-ink
sketches of the artist being carried before the Comman-
dant. The Finstermiinz Pass really did look terrible in
the evening light, as we drove up to it, and I felt some
fear that we should make even a more dangerous " leap in30

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

the dark" than Lord Derby. I had forgotten that we
must get down to the valley of the Inn again, in order to
go up the Engadin, and when our Einspanner deliberately
began diving with us down an almost perpendicular
descent, you may be sure we rather impetuously got out-
Even on foot it was terrible work. The whole sensitive
and percipient part of us was concentrated in the toes of
our boots, so that when we reached the bottom at
Martinsbriicke, where we leave the Tyrol for the Swiss
Canton of Grraubunden (Grrisons), and were asked " whether
we had anything to declare," Edward faintly answered,
" Two pair of boots," instead of " two pounds of tea" (it
was only a pound and a half by this time). He apolo-
gized, on the ground that he could not declare anything
of which he was not percipient, and that he was at the
time percipient only of his boots. But the Swiss custom-
house officer only stared at him, and waived both the tea
and the metaphysics with a grand air that made him feel
very foolish,—which he was, you know.

Our " Badeker" said the drive to Schuls was dull; but I
suppose the writer hadn't ever tried it, and only " damned
ifc at a hazard," as Charles Lamb did the old lady's hero
whom he didn't know well enough to join her in blessing.
The Rhsetian Alps on one side and the Stelvio range on
the other made every turn in the valley of the Inn a
fresh wonder; and when, after a slight shower, the sun
came out and completely bridged the glen with one of
the most brilliant of double rainbows, if my heart didn't
leap up as high as Mr. Wordsworth's on a like occasion,
it was only for want of the full poetic buoyancy of his. IA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	31

am sure even lie never saw a more wonderful sight than
those delicate aerial arches, one bright, the second faint,
stretching from peak to peak of solid, barren masses of
rock and snow, while the green river running swiftly
under it, lost itself in the shadow of mountains blackened
by the passing storm. "We got into Schuls just as the
heavy part of the storm reached us, and found more civi-
lised quarters than at Nauders, but rather pemion-Wks, if I
may be excused the expression,—in other words, an hotel
in which people are half expected to converse with each
other as at a great boarding-house, and the other guests
scrutinise you when you come in as a new arrival is scru-
tinised by those who. are expected to adapt themselves to
his society. Hence inns which are also pensions—inns
with medicinal waters or baths in the neighbourhood—
are a little distressing to the reserve of English travellers.

It rained all night, but the next morning was lovely,
and we went part of the way through the pine woods up
the opposite Alp, falling in with a caravan of chalet carts,
drawn by meek-eyed oxen, whose bells you could hear
tinkling through the clear air a quarter of a mile below,
as they wound up the rough, steep road, which was little
more than a dry watercourse. The bells are meant to
warn descending carts of their approach, for there are
only a few places where the one could get aside into the
wood to let the others pass, and it is necessary, therefore,
to have long notice. The caravan was taking up supplies
to the thirteen chalets on the Alp,—at a height of three
or four hours* march above the valley, A fine dog gravely
accompanied the little company of mountaineers, and came32	A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.

up to me with a profound confidence in the pleasure I
should take in making his acquaintance that was very
gratifying. Certainly I should dislike pensions less if the
pensionnaires were dogs who offer you their friendship in
this grave and serious manner, lifting a large paw up to
your arm, instead of chattering men and women. From
Schuls to Zernetz was scarcely a less grand excursion
than the previous day's between Nauders and Schuls, and
during the drive we came in sight of one grand glacier,
with a small company of coal-black rocks scattered over
it, which brought out in wonderful relief its dazzling
whiteness. And what a pretty little nest of a town was
Zernetz, where the Spohl joins the Inn, and the valley
widens (as usual at a confluence of gorges) into a bright
wide basin of the greenest turf! It was the most charm-
ing little inn too, very quiet, but with the most perfect
appointments; where the trout were ethereal, the soup
good, even the beef edible, and the eternal Mehlspeise—a
pudding varying from sponge cake to omelette, according
to the proportion of eggs—was conceived and executed
with a Parisian delicacy of feeling that transfigured it into
a new and ideal type. They say that the Engadin supplies
cooks to all Europe, who, when they have made their
little fortunes, come back and set up inns in their native
towns. Certainly the cook of the "Lion" at Zernetz
must have had Parisian training. I had made Edward
buy me a quarter of a pound of salt for my private salt-
cellar, to the unbounded astonishment of almost the only
shopwoman in the little town; but here it was not
needed;—we had separate salt spoons, and the whitestA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	33

linen I ever saw. Cosy little Zernetz, when shall I for-
get the bright impression of the cheerfulness and homeli-
ness, in sight of so much grandeur, it made upon me P It
was a place where you felt compelled to talk to the
friendly inhabitants, even though you could only make
yourself half understood. All of them talk Romansch (a
curious Latin patois), but most of them also talk German,
and I quite struck up a friendship with an old woman
who pursued her spinning on a bench in the open air
near our inn. What an amusement it was, too, to see the
goats, with their tinkling bells, come down at night from
the mountain, and sort themselves to their different homes !
One opposite us had to stand for an hour waiting outside
her door, bleating, till her mistress came home, and the
poor creature was quite uneasy at the delay, and nibbled
mortar off the wall, in the hope, I suppose, of effecting an
entrance burglariously. I myself could not subside into
my novel till the old woman arrived with the key. "When
shall we have such a sunset walk as that again by the
side of the river, with the amber clouds resting on the
snowy edges of the hills, the pale half-moon hanging
just above them, and the autumn crocuses making a
violet carpet of the sward at our feet ? The Spohl, white
with melted glacier, runs for a long stretch in the same
channel with the green Inn, their waters quite unmingled,
and the pretty little town (shaped like a Y, as ara many
of these Engadin towns, the church standing at the meet-
ing-point of the two branches), stretches one of its arms
towards the valley of the Spohl, the other along the course

of the Inn. The Michaelmas daisy grew wild here in

p34

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

large, bright patches, and seems to me singularly expres-
sive of this cheerful, cosy, simple little Alpine village,—

" Thou unassuming common-place
Of Nature, with that homely face,

And yet with something of a grace
Which Love makes for thee."

From Zernetz we came in a short morning drive to
Pontresina, where I regret to say English travellers and
pompous alpenstocks are as plenty as gentians and pines.
We find both the inns so full that we are boarded off in a
pretty little room of a private house, looking straight on
the grand Roseg Glacier. There are two alloys. One is
that we have little journeys to make to the hotel for our
meals, and generally have to go first to order them, and a
second time to eat them. But as our fellow-guests there
say that they never get any sleep at night for the noise of
the guides' room, where they make a fuss till after twelve
and begin getting up again at four, that is perhaps a
trifling evil. But the second alloy is more serious. It is
the queerest of queer houses we are in, consisting mostly
of large, pitch-dark, wooden halls, seemingly stacked
with wood,—behind which I believe brigands to be
secreted in large bands,—-but with two cheerful little
rooms for their victims. Edward's money is all in gold
in his pocket, and as the old crone to whom the house
seems to belong is usually out, we have been given a
gigantic door-key to let ourselves in to our doom. I am
rather low in spirits, perhaps, for Edward is just come
back from the post, and I have no letter from Hannah,A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

35

and consequently no news of my darlings. Hannah was,
I think, " keeping company" when I left,—" with a
most respectable young man, Ma'am, a carpenter;—his
father have five houses of his own, which will be Robert's
when the old gentleman die/'—and I fear she has neglected
her letter. I hope she has not neglected her charge. Yet,
if we perish here from assassins' hands, perhaps it would
be well for them also not to survive. In profound gloom,
I am, Sir,—perhaps for the last time,—your obedient
servant,

A Wife on Her Travels.IY.

Pontresina, September 21, 1867.

CIR,—Really it's ratlier nice, you know, seeing one's
own ideas in print. We have got my first two
letters, and I don't think they read badly at all, especially
the bits about domestic matters, which strike me as rather
graphic. I mustn't let Hannah and the little ones know,
or it'll turn their heads; and I am sure Hannah's is half-
way round already, with her " highly respectable " young
man, and his father's five houses. You'll like to know
she did write, after all, and sent a most reassuring
account of my pets; and her " duty to master, and the
taxgatherer have called, and say he have charged him
13s. 2d. for a coat of arms, and I tell him master's coat
have arms just like other gentlemen's; but he pay the
taler for them, and I never heard of nobody's being taxed
for them; and he say he don't mean that at all."
Edward laughed so, but isn't that too bad ? You see
most of my relatives put little crests and things at the
top of their note-paper—my sisters Amelia and Dora, and
my cousin Emilia (who is of a Derbyshire family, and
you know all the Derbyshire people are rather high in an
aristocratic sense)—indeed, I may say most of my side ofA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	37

the family;—and so I got Edward, whose family, I
believe, is not quite—well, not exactly, you know,—so
highly connected as mine, to let me put a crest at the top
of my paper, and now they want me to pay taxes for it,
the nasty things ! "Well, won't I keep the man waiting
for his money after this! It's too bad, and I do wish
you would write against charging people for putting a
little clasped hand or broken arrow at the top of their
note-paper. I am sure Mr. Gladstone wouldn't have
approved of that, and that it's all on account of a Tory
Government and this new democratic Reform, because
they think the common people will grudge us our little
distinction now. I'm sure I think it would be only fair,
if I saved the tax out of my poor-money, if that's it.

Oh ! but about this place we are just leaving, Pon-
tresina. Well, I must say, it really is a lovely place, and
there were no brigands behind those great stacks of wood,
after all. But how we should have blazed up if we had
been once set on fire ! There are two or three spacious
dark rooms, all filled with wood. The crone whose house
it seems to be, says she is insured, and I believe there is a
little brass plate on the house saying that it is insured
both at Bale and Trieste; but then it would have been
just as bad for us to be burned in our beds in an insured
house as in an uninsured, and I'm sure we should not
have time to escape. She says there are two or three
years' consumption of wood here, but whether for her own
house only, or for the inn opposite, a staff appointment in
which she seems to have, I don't know. I should have
thought they could have supplied all the village for ten38

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

years with fire-wood out of it, so you may think how I
have looked after sparks. And such hot weather,
too! To be sure, after dark it is chill enough,—
Pontresina lying higher than the top of Snowdon, or
indeed Ben Nevis;—but then the air has been so dry,
and in the day-time there has been a sun that would
have almost turned your paper to tinder. What faces all
the climbers have had ! There were two Germans at the
table d'hote for several days, off whom I could scarcely
take my eyes. They had good-natured, intelligent, acute,
reading faces, as of young professors or Privat-Docente
perhaps, and very long noses, which were vermilion with
the sun, the brightest vermilion I ever saw, and yet shy,
sober, modest noses, that would have been retiring if
nature had permitted, which she didn't; and though
these noses seemed to twinkle with gratification at having
achieved so much tanning on the mountain-side, they yet
appeared to apologize for boasting so openly, as it were,
of their hardy exposure. We met the double noon of
these blazing faces the first day at the table d'hote, and
they kindled up Edward's mountaineering zeal in a
moment. You remember the poet Campbell's asserting
of Hope that she

" Lit her torch at Nature's funeral pile P "

Well, Edward was just like her. He lit his torch at the
still flaming pyre of those once-studious countenances.
He spent our first morning in Pontresina, Sunday, I am
sorry to say, in working me up to the point of going up
the Piz Languard. It was then I felt how terribly theA WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

tonic of this wonderful air had told upon him. At
Wandsworth, I may say, without any want of modesty,
that I am usually mistress of the situation. To be sure,
then, like Cornelia, I can point to " my jewels,'' or, if
necessary, fall back on the inscrutable Necessities of a
housekeeper's inner world. But at Pontresina, at all
events, Edward was too many for me. I have a dread of
ascents. My character is not adventurous,—a good deal
of the modest daisy about it. Then, too, I am frail.
Rising at four is abhorrent to my whole nature; and the
only alternative,—toiling up perpendicular heights in a
blazing sun,—is impossible to me. However, Edward
overcame me mightily. He left me no interval from the
attack till I had agreed to go, except, indeed, while we
were in church,—and that was, unfortunately, a very
short time, for we went to the German service, and these
Swiss pastors are so very expeditious in " transacting
their devotions," that he got it all over in half an hour,
sermon, prayers, hymns, and all. I can't say I followed
the sermon. Edward said it was a very trite and empty
little homily about " the Unjust Steward," and seemed
chiefly intended to economise the Christian faith as much
as possible. After service—and when I had given way
about the Piz Languard,—we wandered on the hills
picking handfuls of the most brilliant little turquoise
gentian,—such a wee bright love of a flower!—murmur-
ing snatches of Wordsworth, drinking at the sweetest
little streams, and, in short, feeding " these minds of ours
with a wise passiveness." Then we descended to dinner,
and it was decreed, contrary, I confess, to my inner judg-40

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

ment, that we were to have two horses ready the next
morning at five o'clock, and go up the Piz Languard.
The horses, you know, only take you about three-fourths
of the way. The remaining quarter you must go on foot
(with a guide and an alpenstock).

Ah ! how reluctantly I rose,—Edward had been awake
all night, I think, looking at his watch by moonlight and
by dawn, and filling my dreams with a vague impression
of morbid activities. As we let ourselves out of our
house to go to breakfast at the inn, we certainly saw a
vision I shall never, while I live, forget. The mountains
were turned to the richest crimson in the rising sun,—
and the scene in the still morning,—" the very houses
seemed asleep,"—was one of the strangest and most
visionary glory. I could not help whispering to myself,
" Arise, shine ; for thy light is come, and the glory of the
Lord is risen upon thee. For behold darkness shall cover
the earth, and gross darkness the people; but the Lord
shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon
thee. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light,# and
kings to the brightness of thy rising." Surely Isaiah
must have seen such a sunrise as that dyeing the snows
of Lebanon, before he wrote his prophecy of a more
glorious dawn.

I didn't mean, however, to give way to my feelings, but
you must excuse a woman's pen. Well, we breakfasted,
—as far as it was possible at that hour,—in company
with a little middle-aged German lady, whom I believe
to be, if not Madame Ida Pfeiffer's daughter, destined one
day to eclipse that lady's pedestrian fame, by the achieve-A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

ments of a yet more indefatigable pair of legs. " Perhaps
leathery seems the word which most exactly expresses her,"
—but then in the sense of light elastic leather, like that of
a small cricket-ball. She told us she was going up alone
with her guide, not going to ride at all,—remember, it
is from three to four hours' stiff climb from Pontresina to
the top, and a long two hours and a half back again.
She was some time after us in starting. We set off on
two strong-looking brutes (but my pony was obviously
too fat), through the sweetest morning air you can con-
ceive,—though the flush had vanished from the sky.
We almost immediately turned into the pine woods,
where the path wound steeply up over knotted tree-roots,
and past the edge of most uncomfortable places. We had
a man and a boy for our horses, as well as the guide,—
who was a handsome, tall, vigorous fellow, with as easy a
slouch in going up the stiffest ascents as if he had been
strolling in his garden. He was dreadfully inattentive
to me though, so long as we continued on horseback.
When I whimpered a little because my fat pony would
stand panting on the very edge, almost over the edge, of
the precipices, to recover its breath, and Edward, in the
most eloquent German I ever heard, insisted on the
guide's attending to me, he only looked scornful, and
intimated it was the business of the man who came to
lead the horse. But the man who came to lead the horse
declared it was the pony's business, and not his, and he
would not even let me hold my own bridle. Mildly but
firmly he knotted it on the creature's neck, explaining
that she herself knew best where to go, and that if she42

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

preferred panting on the edge of an abyss, to panting a
little distance from the edge, it was better for her, and
me, and all of us, that she should pant there, and not
elsewhere. I can't say I saw it, but whimpering was no
good, so I endured. At last we came out of the pine
woods, and saw three white-sheeted peaks glittering quite
close to us, above a great stretch of bright green moun-
tain meadow, on which we were emerging,—and then,
one after another, peak after peak, forming a great
amphitheatre of Alps, grew up almost close under our
eyes;—and, at our feet, as if beauty were vying with
power, flower after flower of the most vivid colours,
and of the most minute and exquisite finish,—pink saxi-
frages that I never saw before, three kinds of gentians,
and campanulas of many lovely sorts—enamelled the
turf on which we were riding. We had not been winding
up the steep and narrow terraced paths many more
minutes, when at one of our turns I saw the German
lady, pursuing us in the distance with swift, steady tread,
recking little of bogs or stones, swinging along at an
even, scientific pace, which my fat courser could not
emulate. Her lungs were wonderful, for as she climbed
she chattered on, at the same even, swinging pace, to her
guide, who gazed on her in mute admiration, as on one
of the most wonderful works of this wonderful creation.
She passed us once, but she becoming entangled in a bog,
we passed her again, and reached the place where we left
the horses before her. Here, at last, our guide did pay
me some attention. He took my hand in his up the
dizzy, stony, arduous path, and slouched up as if I wereA WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

43

a feather, and the path that famous broad way,—down
hill, I conclude,—which so many are said to find.
Edward went in advance, and, with his usual impetuosity,
started at much too quick a rate. One of his lungs has
been inactive for many years back, and a month or two
ago he had a slight attack upon it, which made him very
poorly indeed for a time. So I was more alarmed than
surprised to come upon him in about half an hour sitting
gasping on some stones, looking as white as a sheet and
covered with cold, damp perspiration, as if he were just
going to faint. The guide gave him some water, and he
recovered his colour; but I, like the late Mr. Lincoln,
put my foot down firmly against going farther. Just at
this moment the little German lady, who had walked all
the way, skipped past us with her guide, chattering
volubly, and recommending Edward not to overdo his
strength. It reminded me of a translation I once heard
used in a Dissenting chapel of a verse in the 104th
Psalm, " The high hills are a refuge for the wild
goats, and so are the stony rocks for the mountain
mouse." If there be, or ever was, a mountain mouse,
that little German lady must have partaken of its moral
constitution. She skipped up to the top (5,000 feet
above Pontresina, and 10,500 feet above the sea), stayed
there an hour, skipped down, passed us, who had rested
and dawdled on the way back, reached the hotel before
the table d'hote, with a very scarlet neck, and tri-
umphantly narrated her achievements to a crowd of
plain but admiring young women, as she threw veal,
raw ham, " brains," and other nutritious but, to English44

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

taste, revolting victuals into the system which had served
her so well. "We, who had ridden three-fourths of the
way, on the contrary failed abjectly. But I was not
going to see Edward really faint away on the edge of a
precipice, a thousand miles away from his little family, so
I insisted mildly but firmly on descending. We met a
long string of climbers on the way back, and in answer
to inquiries had to explain dejectedly that we had not
reached the summit. One young Englishman was
towing, by a great leather belt, a fair young lady who
wore a linen mask over her face, to shield her face
from the sun—and, I suppose, the view. Lower down
we met a sturdy English matron of near sixty-five, I
should say, who volunteered an explanation of her posi-
tion with much bland dignity :—" You see, I told my
young people to go on, and not mind me. I just kept
this little squire [pointing to a Pontresina lad of twelve]
to carry my bag, and I shall go just as far as it suits me,
and no farther,"—here she struck her staff with a firm
air on the ground,—" but I would not be a tie on them/'
Edward said he would give odds that the old lady reached
the top, but as I don't bet, and our guide was in deep
dejection,—he had never yet, he said, failed in getting
his party to the top,—no one took the bet. We enjoyed
our lunch, though, greatly, on a big stone where the
horses stop short; and even the guide, having con-
descended to drink a good part of our excellent Inferno
wine, and munch a hearty repast, stretched his handsome
form upon the rock, and slept vigorously. The view was
the better half of the panorama visible from the top, andA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	45

included all the near Bernina range. There is no Alpine
view of such various-coloured peaks. The mountains are
not, Edward says, so huge as the Oberland Alps, for they
rise from so much higher a tableland that you do not
guess at their full height; but there are so many nearly
black peaks as well as brown and grey among them (black
peaks are scarcely ever seen in Western Switzerland),
and the multitude of glaciers, large and small, is so great,
that the peaks often seem inlaid with different colours,
and give an effect of colour much richer than that of the
mountains in the Tyrol, or even lower down in the
Engadin. From the little green lake of St. Moritz,
shining like an emerald in the sun, at some four or five
miles' distance, the Piz Oet towering above it, and the
Piz Julier, with its huge double glacier close at hand,
there was an uninterrupted chain of peaks of many
colours, ten miles at least in length, and none of them
more than five miles distant. The grand sweeps of the
Morderatsch and the Paradies glaciers were just opposite
to us, the little Languard tarn was sparkling on the turf
at our feet, and the wide rolling swells of green mountain
which made the foreground of all this grandeur, gave a
sense of freedom with the power, such as Alpine views
seldom afford. Poor Edward was ill in the afternoon
with the over-exertion ;—of course, we descended on foot.
But what could he expect if he won't be guided by me ?
He says that I never opposed it on the ground of over-
fatigue, but only on that of the dangerousness of the way.
But I never wish him to be persuaded by my arguments,
—only to accept my conclusions. No doubt men are46	A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

more logical, but what is the use of that, if they get at a
foolish result by a wise method ?

We had two more lovely excursions at Pontresina with
a Mr. Q., a slim, poetical young man—such a dear!—
whom we met at the table d'hote. He asked to join us in
our Einspanner to the top of the Bernina Pass, and after-
wards to the Roseg Glacier, and as he politely insisted on
sitting before, by the driver, of course we couldn't object.
That was a lovely day on the Bernina. The Bernina,
you know, is the watershed between Italy and the Enga-
din—indeed, in a sense, between the Adriatic and the
Black Sea, for the Inn reaches the Black Sea eventually,
via the Danube; and the Adda reaches the Adriatic, via
the Po. There are two sweet little lakes upon it, one
very black, of spring water, the Lago Nero, which sup-
plies the Inn;—the other, quite white, full of glacier
water, the Lago Bianco, which supplies the Adda. They
are the loveliest little lakes, and a sort of "Welsh tinge
covers the surrounding hills. But for the great glacier
which supplies the Lago Bianco, and one or two snow
peaks peeping up, we might have thought we were in
Wales. We walked all round them, through such a
valley of rocks, our new friend Mr. Q. discriminating the
beauties with great delicacy. A niece of mine, who is
writing a great book on " The Watersheds of the World"
—she read a most successful paper at the Social Science
Association last year—would have enjoyed so being with
us!—but I don't deserve to see these sort of things, for I
asked Edward where was the shed over the water, on
which he had to explain to me that it meant " shed " inA WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

47

the sense in which, a tree sheds its leaves, and not in the
sense of the shed in our garden where my little ones are
so fond of scampering in the rain.

And what shall I say of the Morderatsch and the
Roseg glaciers ? Why, only that they look much more
beautiful at a distance than close at hand, where you can
see the dirt,—morain, I think they call it,—on their
lower snows. They are both more of a mer de glace, or
Eismeer, as they call it in German, than of a glacier in the
common sense. You do not see the blue needles of ice, or
the deep blue crevasses, half so distinctly as in many of
the Oberland glaciers, Edward says. Their prevailing
colour is white, not blue, at a distance. I can't say that
I think it can have repaid the Princess Alice, who went
to the Roseg the day before we did, to have been jogged
to death almost as we were, in an Einspanner without
springs, only in order to see the dirt and stones of the
morain better. The Princess bore it, they say, like an
angel, and only exclaimed, quoting from Charity Peck-
sniff, " Oh that I should live to be so shook !" Such
were her gracious words. A beautiful youth, whom
Edward and Mr. Q. called Apollo, drove us, but I know
he took delight in giving us unexpected jogs. His
countenance realised the perfect calm after which Mr.
Arnold aspires so beautifully. He seemed, however, to
feel, with him,—

44 Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well,"

—for with all his serenity he evidently felt life a com-
paratively innocent and perhaps tedious affair, for which48	A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.

occasional alleviation might be found in causing such
fearful jogs as nearly flung us out of the Einspanner.
Even Mr. Q. was grieved. He had counted much upon
his Roseg Glacier excursion, and yet was only fagged by
it. He got hot on the morain with his alpenstock, and
was visibly ruffled when he rejoined us. He showed us
rather bashfully some verses written last night on " The
Roseg Glacier," which are rather serious, you know; but
I think, if you don't mind, they would not give you a
bad notion of it. Edward told me privately there was
more merit in the idea than the expression, which is,
I believe, a very sound and favourite form of critical
depreciation,—but I thought they were sweetly pretty,
and asked Mr. Q. if he would mind their appearing in
print, which he bashfully admitted he wouldn't, if you
thought them good enough. You won't be so cruel as to
say they aren't good enough, and exclude them, or what
can I say when I see Mr. Q. again? You must know
the Roseg Glacier is dotted with black rocks in grotesque
shapes, and one of them is called the Capuchin Friar, on
account of what looks like a cape:—

" The Boseg at Midnight.

" Through the sweet night half-waking I had lain,

Lulled by the murmur of the rushing Inn,

"Which seemed like memory without its pain,

The eager years of youth without their sin.

" I rise : in moon-lit curves the glacier spreads,

The peaks in ghostly beauty veil their might,

The dark firs wave their faintly lighted heads,
The landscape seems a phantom of the night.A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	49

" Those polar snows, lapped in soft summer air,

That ice, which sparkles back a Southern moon,—

Those black-stoled rocks, like monks in wrath or prayer
Bowed bare-kneed on the glacier, late and soon,—

" Eeal are they ?—or such dreams of fevered brain
As wise men conjure now from sky and sod,—

That Love shrinks back from Law's advancing reign,—

That the Ice-Sea of Science threatens God ?"

There, now, aren't they sweetly pretty ? And it really
is rather like the Roseg by moonlight;—gives the extra-
ordinary dreaminess, you know.

We are just off from Pontresina, and I must close.
We have fortunately missed the B/s at Pontresina. They
descended over the Bernina Pass into Italy, and were, I
believe, detained at Colico, on the Lake of Como, on their
return, to be fumigated, for they had got into cholera
districts. Melisina will be writing a paper on " The
Irritation of the Smaller Cells of the Bronchial Tubes
caused by the Sanitary Precautions of the Italian State."
We had such a disappointment last night! We drove
over to Samaden, to see a beloved uncle and cousins of
ours. They were departed, verreist, and our hearts sank.
We only saw General M'Clellan instead, and I believe
our carriage nearly knocked him down. He executed a
rapid and masterly manoeuvre, like the flank march to
the James River, to avoid us, and nearly fell into the
little river. The shadows were falling as we returned in
tender dejection to Pontresina, but the moon showed her
pale face above the snow before the crimson light had
quite faded from the opposite heights.—I am, Sir, &c.,

A Wife on Her Travels.

eY.

Chub, September 28, 1867.

ClR,—Our holiday culminated, or, as the almanacks
say of the moon, " southed/' at Pontresina, for there
it passed its meridian, its middle point in time, and its
most southerly in space. Indeed, by this day week I
hope to be at home once more. Edward says our holi-
day has lost all its spring and elasticity in consequence
He has been mumbling at intervals ever since, in dirge-
like tones, to himself, " Half of their heavy task was done,
and the clock told the hour for retiring;" nay, he has
even been so illogical—I am sure men even beat women
in that at times—as to wish that he could always " have
all his holiday in the first half; " for he say$v its back
seems somehow broken when there is more of it behind
than before. But I have tried to impress upon him that
to have all of anything in the first half is impossible,—
doesn't Miss Cobbe call that sort of thing impossible a
priori?—and what is worse, inconvenient. My little
Colin, who, as he is only three years old, can scarcely
have contracted an appetite for anything so morbid, so
much like a metaphysical pate de foie gras, as an a priori
impossibility, always seems to me to be in the way ofA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	51

wishing to have all his cake in the first half; and if it
came to be the family ambition of oar house in general,
which it might, you know, if the master sets the example,
what a domestic circle ours at Wandsworth would be !
However, we have enjoyed ourselves excessively since
leaving Pontresina, but Edward will say " the gold is off
the gingerbread" because his office draweth nigh. I
tell him he should be ashamed to regret going back to
his little family. For my part, I feel, with the runaway
postman in " Martin Chuzzlewit," that " my bright home
is in the settin' Sun" (on Wandsworth Common), and I
think it's hardly kind of Edward, after I have made such
sacrifices, to lament that the moment is approaching when
I shall be united to my little ones again. When, after a
perilous day's journey, I open my pocket-book at night,
and pore over the thick, dark, curly tress of that dear,
naughty, high-spirited romp, the silky lock of that
darling little trot of mine, and the soft innocent ringlet
of my noble little Colin, I am sure Edward might often
see, if he would, that

" The heart he thought so free and tame
Would struggle like a captive bird."

My sweet Colin ! Edward read aloud the other day, I
believe in a critical mood, one of Mr. Kinglake's eloquent
sentences about Sir Colin Campbell:—" Yet he was of so
fine a nature that although he did not always avoid great
bursts of anger, there was no ignoble bitterness in his
sense of wrong." " That's our Colin to a hair ! " I
said, and burst into tears. Edward did his best to sootheA WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

me, but I suppose I cannot expect that even he should
understand all the mysterious tenderness of such a love
as mine. Forgive me !—it's Colin's birthday to-morrow.
I will struggle for composure.

From Pontresina we turned westward once more. It
was a lovely morning, as we retraced our steps in a
broken-springed Einspanner, from which there was a
rather alarming rebound,—it tossed us like pancakes—
down the Engadin again as far as Ponte, whence we were
to cross the Rhaetian Alps by the Albula Pass to the Upper
Yalley of the Rhine. Here Edward discovered that he
had brought away with him the gigantic door-key of our
Pontresina lodging. And, would you believe? he had a
struggle to part with it. It had always reminded him,
he said, in his misty way, of the mysterious key which
Mephistopheles gives Faust in that strange second part
of the drama—the key which waxes and grows heavy
in Faust's hand, and leads him on, through the heart of
the Earth, into the Solitudes and Wildernesses of absolute
Emptiness, where " the Mothers " reign. When I stared,
and asked what it was all about, Edward admitted he
never had had the least idea what Goethe really meant,
but this big Pontresina key, which he maintained, always
did grow heavier as he held it, the wildernesses and
solitudes of this wild land, and the eerie old crone to
whom the key belonged, and who might well stand for
one of Goethe's mysterious " mothers," combined to make
him feel as if the key were a sort of charm to the inner
secrets of the Alps, and he didn't see why the old woman
should have it back. Only think of an elderly house-A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	53

holder at Wandsworth talking such trash as that;—the
old goose! However, I interfered at once. I'm always
losing my own keys, and I can feel for a fellow-creature,
even though she be a German crone. I took it sternly
from him and gave it to our driver, explaining in broken
German that it was to be returned to the old lady of No.
10, whom he said he well knew and respected. Edward
looked after the key wistfully, but made no resistance;
yet he was distrait and low for some time after. I am
convinced Goethe-reading and German Universities are
very bad training for practical Englishmen. Poor dear
Edward! he has a lot of cobwebs somewhere at the
bottom of his dear addled old brain !

At Ponte the mail was just starting over the Albula
Pass for Bergiin, Tiefenkasten, and Chur (Coire), the
last the capital of the Grisons. We were given places on
the box of a satellite of the main coach,—a three-horse
coach which followed in its wake. We began immediately
to wind up the terraces of the pass, which alarmed me
greatly by their steepness, and I could not conceive how
the mails dare descend them at nighty as they do in coming
from Coire. In about an hour and a half we got to the top
of the steepest part, took our last look back at the Bernina
Alps and the great glaciers—the Morderatsch, Paradies,
and Roseg—gleaming in the distance, saw the sun glitter
for the last time on the green-white Inn, and dived into
the desolate and sterile defile of the Albula Pass. We
were already above the snow, which lay in big patches
wherever it had a little shelter from the sun, in every
hollow beneath us; a chill wind came whistling throughr A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

the pass from the west; we began to see the heavier and
more lumpy masses of the Rhine mountains looming up
in the distance before us, and at every step the defile
around us became wilder and more savage. The Albula-
stock, as it is called, reared its stiff wall in a precipice on
our right, with one mass of pendent glacier, and on our
left was the ragged saw of a mountain ridge, whose
jagged teeth gave something like ferocity of expression
to the barren and precipitous mountains which they
crowned. As we advanced, the pass, at least a mile wide,
became strewn with fragments of rock from brink to
brink without any grass or tint of green amongst them
—the debris, I suppose, of recent landslips or avalanches,
but pounded so small that scarcely any one rock seemed
to exceed the size of an ordinary milestone. I never saw
a scene so desolate. The wind whistled coldly through
the pass, a cloud came over the sun, and I could not help
saying to Edward that the landscape seemed to have
carved upon it, with a rudeness of hand that added to its
grandeur, the very frown of God. There must, neverthe-
less, have been plants, and rare plants, in the crevices
between the rocks which carpeted this Arabia Petraea of
a pass, for I saw two botanists with botanical boxes hunt-
ing carefully for specimens. Soon we began to descend.
Down we dashed, terrace after terrace, sweeping round
such sharp corners that I held my breath and squeezed
Edward's hand,—more in excitement than terror,—as
we approached them at a pace that made me giddy.
There was a fearful sort of rapture in it, too, and it
reminded me of Edgar Poe's fanciful account of theA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	55

descent of the Maelstrom. Our three-horse coach had a
great sprawling piebald for the leader; it was harnessed
before the other two, and apt to take offence at the flicks
our coachman would give it. I am sure I thought that
at one of these corners that piebald would have taken us
over the little dwarf posts, which were often the only-
things between us and 70 feet of perpendicular rock.
Before long we reached a little circular green basin or
valley, where there was a rude little inn. But after
stopping barely two minutes, we rushed off again down
another descent quite as perilous as the last, towards a
lower green basin, where there were a few Alpine huts.
Mr. Dickens would have described the drive thus: —
" Yoho ! past patches of eternal snow, and desolate
precipices, and wildernesses of pounded rock,—yoho!
past little Alpine inns, and green oases sprinkled with
the huts of Alpine herdsmen,—yoho ! past cows and
goats with tinkling bells, and patches of blue campanula
and withered Alpine roses, and little roaring streams
white from their glacier source;" but as nobody does say
yoho ! on either English or German coaches on such
occasions, as far as I know, and I nevjer could seize the
full force of that remarkable expression, I will only refer
to the fact that it occurred to me here as being not im-
probably Mr. Dickens's not very expressive device for
suggesting the inarticulate excitement of such a wild
drive as this of ours. I admit that I felt at times
inclined to scream with something between pain and
pleasure when I saw the mail coach rattling on, a terrace
or so beneath us, and knew that we must be in another56

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

minute or two where it was; but if I had shrieked, it
certainly would not have been yoho ! which strikes me as
a somewhat feeble and sentimental form of yell. There
was one terrible moment. My broad-brimmed Leghorn
hat, trimmed, as I think I have before remarked, with a
slight but elegant wreath of ivy-leaves,—by this time
somewhat the worse for wear,—escaped from my trembling
grasp, and flew on the road behind us. Edward explained
the catastrophe to the driver,/ who was just before us,
and that excellent person immediately put the thongs into
my dear Edward's weak grasp, and descended in search
of my hat. The corner just in front was a fearful one ;
the stage coach was rushing on swiftly before us; the
sprawling piebald was showing a good deal of competi-
tive zeal; and Edward was, I may say, entirely unaccus-
tomed to driving a three-in-hand. I trembled for the
result. I exclaimed impetuously, " Perish my straw hat
and its elegant though no longer brilliant wreath, rather
than eight lives should be endangered! " But while I was
uttering this apostrophe, which, being in English, was
naturally unintelligible to the coachman, he returned
with my hat, took the reins from the uncertain hand
which held them, and we were again in comparative
safety. I shall have that hat—my Albula hat—cleaned
and retrimmed when I get home. It represents, as
Louis Napoleon would say, a memory and an escape.
We rushed down that corkscrew descent for hours,
passing from one green basin to another at a lower
level, till it seemed as if we should get into the heart
of the earth.A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

57

After dinner at Bergiin we were transferred to a still
smaller tributary of the mail,—an Einspanner, driven by
an infant of ten or eleven, in which, but for the said
infant, we were alone,—an intermediate satellite with
two horses forming the link between us and the main
mail coach, so that now we were a caravan of three. I
never saw a child of greater composure than our driver.
He drove us down a dark and savage vale which they
say is very like the Via Mala in the Spliigen Pass, with
the utmost sang-froid, and used his drag with an elderly
caution that gained him my highest esteem. But, dear
me, how hot it got as we descended ! TJsed as we had
been to the Pontresina air, the burning afternoon sun of
the close valley as we approached Tiefenkasten (" Deep-
Box," as they may well call it) was almost more than I
could bear. The dizzy descent, the suspense of that
minute while Edward held the reins, and the oppressive
heat of the evening, rather overcame my frail system.
When we got out at Tiefenkasten I was still just con-
scious, thanks to my salts. But even then I had much
to bear. The inn was excellent, but the Albula torrent
roared round it, and the rush of its waters came in so
loud at both windows of our room that we could scarcely
hear each other speak ; and all night it roared on, so that
whether I was part of it, or it was part of me, was the
one insoluble problem which I was vainly trying to solve
all night, in what Edward was pleased to call my sleep.
In the morning I had no nerves at all, and when Edward
proposed a new pass, or new passes, first the Schyn Pass,
I think, to Thusis, and then the Spliigen, I said to him at58	A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.

once, " My dear Edward, I have made some sacrifice to
come here; you know how susceptible I am ; these passes
are too much for me, they shatter me. Let us have some-
thing tame and peaceful/'

Well, we did try for it, and I believe Edward intended to
have a really tame journey that day up the Landwasser to
Davos-am-Platz, a quiet and lovely green table-land,
strewn with chalets in the most picturesque way. But
the truth is, everything is a pass hereabouts. We wound
through the pine woods, half-way up the mountain-side,
in and out, doubling every winding of the mountains for
miles, along a path which even the natives call a mere
"goat's path," in parts artificially made with timber
forced into the mountain-side, and an immense precipice
beneath us. The great glaciers of the Albulastock closed
the view behind us, and the Landwasser roared at an
immense depth below. I doubt if we were ever in more
real danger than on that jolting little mountain cart, but
as we went very slowly, it did not impress the imagination
so much as the rushing of the mail coach, and when we
did reach the Davos table-land, everything like danger
and terror was clearly over. Anything more like the
ideal "Happy Valley" I never saw. Broad green pas-
turages below, and, breaking the thick pine woods above,
plenty of those green, fresh, turfy hollows to which the
Swiss herdsmen appropriate the name of " Alp; " chalets,
with their roofs dotted with those picturesque stones,
were sprinkled everywhere over the broad valley; church
spires peeped up every two or three miles; cows and
goats, with tinkling bells, sauntered about the mountains;A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	59

and the rapid little Landwasser, bridged roughly every
half-mile or so, and pouring out of an exquisite little
green lake, the Davosersee, in which it takes its source,
drew a winding, sparkling line of beauty across the
picture.

The landscape was certainly peaceful enough, I must
admit; and thankful I was for two days' rest in this
primitive place. We were rather roughly received,
though. The people at the inn seemed to dislike us
as foreigners, and the good old Swiss clergyman dragged
us into his sermon rather pointedly on the Sunday, when
impressing brotherly feeling on his people. This was
partly, I fancy, because Edward and I, who went into
church before anybody else, sat together, and it after-
wards appeared that the men and women sit apart, so we
were marked out by our blunder as "aliens in blood,
language, and (perhaps) religion." Davos is a primitive
watering-place, frequented almost solely by Swiss, mostly,
indeed, by the people of Chur (Coire, the capital of the
Grisons). There is some jealousy felt of strangers there,
I think, and certainly we were a good deal snubbed by
the young women who seemed to manage the otherwise
comfortable inn—an old Rathhaus, or town-hall. But
the Swiss visitors were a kindly, comfortable old set, after
all. A venerable old man, with heavy silver spectacles,
who sat opposite Edward at the table d'hote, and who had
a child-like pleasure in our blunder in church, reciting it
at dinner to his neighbours with the most rapturous
delight, took my fancy, in spite of, perhaps in conse-
quence of, the pleasure we afforded him. Once, when6o	A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

Edward awkwardly dropped a dish with something like
ground rice in it—he was a little agitated by my urgency
to know what was in it, and whether it was whole-
some or barbarous food, before it was handed to me—this
venerable old man laughed so long, and with such
harmless and childlike enjoyment, that all the table
d'hote, ourselves included, joined him in his mirth, and
I am convinced that his declining years will be gilded
to the last, as by a sort of sunset, with the glow of this
unparallelled event. He was a good old man, and smiled
and chuckled in a most friendly way whenever he saw
Edward afterwards, as much as to say, " Deep-rooted
in that ground-rice pudding there is a sentiment of
mutual regard between us, which death itself will not
extinguish/'

Well, here we are at last in Chur (or Coire), the capital
of the Grisons, and the most beautiful of mountain cities,
with its rapid mountain torrent, the Plessur, running
through its principal street, or avenue, to join the infant
Rhine, about a mile off, and its great mountains rising on
nearly every side, yet not so close but that both north
and west you get the loveliest distant views, and great
stretches of sunset cloud. Yet, certainly of all Swiss
cities it seems the most utilitarian: there is not a Swiss
toy or a bit of Swiss carving in it. When Edward tried
to-day to get a paper-knife,—so favourite a manufacture of
many Swiss Cantons,—the only instrument he could, with
difficulty, and after much inquiry, procure, was a dirty
yellow bit of flat bone with a hole in it, for which he was
charged 6d. We have not seen a single pretty thing inA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	61

any one shop of this most lovely town. I can't find
anything pretty to buy, and if we don't take something
beautiful back to Edward's mother, that austere old lady
will certainly frown darkly upon us. She is an Admiral's
niece, I believe, and has imbibed quite naval ideas of
discipline. Edward says that in his childhood, the way
she would ring the upstairs bell for him and his brothers,
when they were late in the morning, was positively
alarming;—it was like " piping all hands on deck."
Then, though so disciplinarian with her sons, she is
strictly humanitarian about her servants, and even now
won't let Edward ring the bell for them. "No, my
dear," she says, "they have had much more fatigue
to-day than you. Go to the bottom of the stairs, and say,
' Annabella, when you next come upstairs for some other
purpose, but not before, please bring candles.' " Oh dear !
what shall I do if I can't find something pretty to take
home to my mother-in-law ? By the way, I should
much like to have the Spectator's view—the " earnest "
view, you know—of mothers-in-law. It might be of
the greatest service, Sir, to your obedient servant,

A Wife on Her Travels.

P.S.—Dear me, I am so fluttered ! How can you speak
so lightly of my judgment—"alert, but we fear un-
sound,"—as you do in answer to "Viator," in your
number of the 21st, which I have just got ? I can't say
how grieved I am we didn't go to the Three Kings
at Bale. But it was all Edward's fault, you know, not
mine. He trusted some foolish person's opinion in the62

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

railway carriage, whom I should never have advised
him to depend upon at all. I assure you my "viva-
city," as you are pleased to call it, is the sort of
vivacity which springs from lucidity of insight, and is
not inconsistent with the most unquestionable weight
of character.YI.

Belvoir Cottage, Wandsworth, October 8, 1867.

ClR,—I am no longer "A Wife on Her Travels."

An inspired but forgotten poet has, I think, the
remark that "there's no place like home." My little
darlings are in my lap,—where, by the way, they cannot
continue to be if I am to be legible,—my eldest stands
proudly by my side; poor Edward is aw^y, scribbling, I
fear dismally, at his office; Hannah has just taken her
orders for a nice sirloin of beef with horse-radish sauce,
Yorkshire pudding, and an apple tart at six o'clock,—a
dinner, I will venture to say, impossible (both a priori
and empirically, as Miss Cobbe would say) abroad;—and
a fire burns pleasantly on the hearth, as I sit down to
realise the changes and chances through which we have
at last reached the haven where we (or at least I,—I am
not so sure of Edward) would be. Do you remember as
well, alas! as I do, the first appearance of " Festus," by
Philip James Bailey ?—a poet of whom some satirist once
disrespectfully observed in your columns, that

" He sang himself hoarse to the stars very early,
And cracked a weak voice to too lofty a tune."

Well, " Festus " and I came out the same year, and what64	A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

makes me remember it particularly is, that I think
Festus and I had exactly the same number of admirers;
I don't mean the poem Festus, you know, that would be
vanity, for I dare say it had thousands of admirers, but
the person. Don't you recall that affecting scene in
"another and a better world," where Festus asks, "Are
all my loved ones here ?" and there answer in chorus
just seven lovely young ladies, "All!" Well, I have
been asking myself the same question this morning.
Don't be shocked, please, for I do not allude to the now
too elderly gentlemen who may have contested with poor
dear Edward the treasure of my hand and heart, but to
the various members of our united little family. Well, I
have asked too often, and with a certain shadow of
pathos in my voice, which it would touch you to hear,
" Are all my loved ones here?" And in the absence of
any reply from Echo, Hannah has been obliged to return
reluctantly for answer, " No, Mum, not all." And so it
is. Though our parrot has been taught to say,—greatly
to Hannah's credit,—"Welcome home! " in the sweetest
and most sentimental voice (we had not been in the
cottage ten minutes before she thus saluted us), though
my dear old black cat Mortimore Junior sleeps quiet on
the hearth (Mortimore Senior was, as there is every
reason to believe, trapped and gathered to his fathers in
the neighbouring park), though my splendid white
Persian cat, her son, a " thing of beauty and a joy for
ever," is in a graceful attitude on our modest little lawn,
yet one there is,—an Oxford cat of high lineage, directly
descended from what Professor Owen calls " the true CatA WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.	65

of the North/'—for whose unrivalled beauty my eyes
seek in vain. " The winter comes, with cloud and cold,
—where is my Tippet gone ? " Hannah has but par-
tially discharged her great trust. My darlings are,
indeed, all safe, if a little thin,—decidedly thinner than
when I left;—I think they have been kept on too low a
diet. But the pride of our house, the cat of highest
lineage, whose every motion was grace, whose undertone
of warm soft grey beneath the leopard stripes drew all
eyes upon her, has strayed, and has now been almost a
week from her home. Noble child of the regal Atossa,
before whose beauty thy cousin Yashti's paled its in-
effectual fires, my heart bleeds for thee ! Thine absence
leaves a dreary blank upon our hearth, a shadow on the
heart of our little household. Take her for all in all, we
shall not look upon her like again !

Pray forgive this digression. But it is only right that
in concluding the history of my travels I should lay
before your readers not only the advantages, but some of
the compensating disasters of a prolonged absence from
home such as is needful for a successful Continental trip.
I will not say that, even during one month at Margate,
we might not have lost her. But thence, at least, more
frequent letters of injunction would have reached Hannah,
and distance diminishes insensibly even the best servant's
feeling of responsibility. Besides, as a matter of fact, it
was during the extra holiday,—which at Margate we
should not have thought of taking,—that this sad loss
occurred. I will be brief as to the beauties of our home-
ward route, the more so as we travelled through a part

F66	A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

of Switzerland which, though one of the grandest, every-
one now knows. From Chur to Rapperschwyl, on the
Lake of Zurich, we went by railway; and my remem-
brance of the heavy, towering mountain walls of the
Wallenstadt Lake, and its curiously mottled green and
white waters, is to some extent alloyed by the vision of a
certain restless family of German Jews who were with us
in the railway "car," and who kept bounding incessantly
up and down like hollow india-rubber balls. They had
all sorts of books, foods, and drinks in their knapsacks,
which they hung up on nails about the carriage, and
changed or took down to ransack every two minutes. The
mother put on and took off her shawl about four times in
an hour. The children fidgeted to match. They got
out strong-smelling cheese in order the better to enjoy
the beauty of the lake, so that their exclamations of
delight came from their stomachs as well as their souls.
They kept a good deal on our track afterwards, and are
associated closely in my mind with grand lakes—both
Wallenstadt and Lucerne—in which I could not help
liking to fancy them suddenly ducked. We evaded
them, however, in the interim. We left the Lake of
Zurich at Horgen, and took an Einspanner to Arth, on
the Lake of Zug. I confess I do not fully enjoy the
gregarious modes of travelling,-—by rail and by steam,—
in Switzerland. The vivacity of strangers vexes, and
their heavy, mute, corporeal companionship oppresses me.
Our drive over the Albis and then under the luxuriant
walnut trees and bright cherry trees on the margin of
the Lake of Zug, with the Rigi looming heavily, throughA WIFE ON HER TRA VELS,

67

a pale orange sky, on the other side of the bright green
water, and the bigger mountains of the Lake of Lucerne
peering out mistily beyond, was lovely as a dream. We
were among the three hundred pilgrims or so who " did "
the Rigi the next day, and though it has become a sadly
Cockney expedition,—certainly more go up it than up
Primrose Hill on any but a Garibaldi-meeting day,—our
fellow-creatures did not entirely blot out the view.
Though a bright morning, it was thick, and the distant
mountains were all invisible, the snow ranges of Uri and
Schwyz being the only ones in sight; but what struck us
most was the wonderful stretch of plain to the north-west
beyond the Zug and Lucerne and Sempach lakes,—an
interminable sea of land, fading away into the distant
blue mist on the horizon, such as I never conceived
before, unless, perhaps, when looking at that wonderful
landscape of Ilubens's, in the National Grallery. We
went up on horses from Arth, but descended to Kiisnacht,
of course on foot, or rather on toe, for I am sure my small
and elegant feet were never placed at any angle less
than that of a fire-escape till we reached Kiisnacht. By
that time a storm was coming on, and whether it were on
account of the electricity in the air, or that the descent
had exhausted Edward as much as it had me, when the
little lad who guided us and carried our bag attempted to
impose on him rather pertly by an inordinate demand for
Trinkgeld, my usually dreamy husband flashed out upon
him with a stream of indignation which astonished me as
much as the boy, who retreated in dismay, leaving his
baggage—a porter's knot—in the hands of the enemy;68

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

—from which he afterwards rescued it by a rapid descent
while Edward's back was turned. The cloud on Edward's
brow and the wrath that flamed from his eye were
repeated on a grander scale half an hour later in the
heavens above us. As our steamer rounded the point
towards Lucerne, and Pilatus, ruggedest of rugged
mountains, came full in sight, sheet after sheet of forked
lightning flamed out, each one pointed as it were just at
the heart of the mountain,—as if Pilate were indeed in
refuge there, as the old fable ran, and Heaven were
searching his retreat with arrows of fire. The rain fell in
torrents, the lake grew black, its waves tumbled angrily
beneath us, and I confess, amidst all this grandeur, I
was frightened even more than becomes a woman.

How grand the broad and rugged summit of Pilatus
looked the next day in a burning sun, as it rose out of a
wide girdle of white mist which circled its middle
heights and how quaint the beautiful old covered bridge
(the Kapellbriicke) over the Reuss, and the round tower
midway, which made the foreground for us as we stood
looking at it! I was amused, as I eat some delicious
green figs which a girl had sold us on the old bridge, to see
the petulance of a sour old lady, a countrywoman of ours
dressed in forbidding mourning, and her fretful daughter,
at the faded old paintings under the bridge. She stood
with " Murray " in hand, snorted a little as she looked at
one or two of the dim old pictures, then shutting her book
with a flounce, said, " I don't believe this is the bridge
at all! " And off they went, apparently in a huff at the
inefficiency of old painters, and the imposition practisedA WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

69

on their modern drawing-room taste by lovers of the
picturesque. From Alpnaeh we drove to the Oberland,
by the Briineck and Meiringen, and found ourselves at
once in a region where as much pains are taken not only
to reap, but to glean, the harvest of strangers, as the
peasants of the more rural districts take in getting in
their little patches of oats and wheat. Disreputable-
looking men got on the step of our carriage and whispered
a few seductive sentences into Edward's private ear about
the necessity for guides, and the pleasure it would be to
them to act in that capacity; small children stopped,
gazed steadily in your face, and struck up ineffectual
yodels; infantine hands stretched out worthless pebbles
beseechingly at you; unripe (if also occasionally ripe)
fruit was offered you every mile or so; Alpine horns
saluted your ears wherever there was a decent echo, and
a hat was ready for the passer-by's contribution; tame
marmots were offered you to stroke; a tame chamois was
unveiled for a consideration; white deal boxes with little
Swiss cottages in them were thrust into your carriage at
every hill where the speed was necessarily relaxed ; worst
of all, the waterfalls were lit up by green, yellow, and red
lights at night, till they looked more like a curious ver-
tical arrangement of the globes in a chemist's shop than
one of the loveliest of Alpine beauties. As a rule,
Edward weakly yielded up coin for all these questionable
delights. I confess I myself was pleased to pat the fat
marmot on the first occasion of its being offered to us; it
was such a very comfortable, rolly-polly creature, and the
little girl who gained by the transaction was rather a nice70

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

little woman; but on the whole we did not like being
gleaned so very carefully. One of our guides, a very
intelligent man, who went with us to the Eismeer at the
Grindelwald, admitted that foreigners, and especially
English, were considered the crop of the country, and
defended it. He said other countries had their wines, or
their cotton manufactures, or their fisheries, or their
sugar-canes, but Switzerland had only its visitors. It was.
only a three months' harvest on the average. If not very
carefully reaped and gleaned the country could not live.
That was very philosophical, but one does not like being
competed for by gleaners anxious that nothing shall be
lost. I myself had but one weakness, if weakness it were.
I confess I could not resist the wild Alpine strawberries.
Sheds containing little tables, with plates of the most
delicious Alpine strawberries, often also raspberries, and
cream, met us in the Oberland every two or three miles.
I yielded on principle. I was a higher being after each
dish. Not even the Alpine air is more refining. I shall
never forget the loathing I felt for a wolfish German who
once at the table d'hote deliberately emptied two-thirds of
a dish, the remaining third of which had sufficed for one
round to all the others of us at table, on to his own plate,
and gobbled them up, with a mischievous leer at us all.
He resembled much more the wolf in "Little Red Riding
Hood " than Miss Thackeray's very mild and humanised
edition of him. He could have known nothing of the
ethereal flavour of the Alpine strawberry, which lifts the
soul above such selfish passions. Pearls before swine are
a weak image, compared with Alpine strawberries beforeA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	71

such an ogreish wretch as that. When Alpine straw-
berries were offered to us, then, at half-a-franc a plate, I
regarded myself not as the gleaned, but as the gleaner.
But at one point we did draw a line. We never humi-
liated ourselves by purchasing one of those white deal
boxes containing a Swiss cottage. I said to Edward,
" One must draw a line somewhere; draw it at these deal
boxes." And we did so. Many fellow-creatures (many
fellow-countrymen, alas!) could not make way against
the temptation, and fell. But they were all conscious of
degradation. You never saw a man carrying about one
of those white deal boxes without a conscience-stricken
shame in his eye. A stranger never passed him without
his glancing uneasily at his deal box, and casting down
his eyes, or, in the case of a sensitive conscience, actually
blushing. I always tried to cover his confusion. I felt
that he had been rather weak than wicked. Poor Edward
would have brought away one of those symbols of a
degenerate will, himself, but for my firmer nature. Our
most glorious day in the Oberland was the ascent from
Meiringen to the great Scheideck, on the way to the
Faulhorn, which we never reached. We had seen the
Reichenbach Falls the night before turned into a
Cremorne Gardens show, by those vulgar red and green
and yellow lights. How different they were in the morn-
ing sun, bridged by two lovely rainbows built upon the
clouds of spray ! It seemed to me, when I looked down
from above on the upper fall leaping incessantly off the
mountain with such force that it does not seem even to bend
downwards for its 200 feet descent till it is already far72

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

from, the rock, that to paint that sweep of waters with
our vulgar Cremorne reds and yellows was scarcely less
profane than some recent attempts to French-polish the
New Testament, and dress up the garden of the Resurrec-
tion in the little coloured lamps of French sentiment.

Perhaps the really grandest thing we saw while we
were away was the view of the Wetterhorn, Wellhorn,
and the great Eiger, on our way from Reichenbach to the
Scheideck. The dark gigantic mass of the Wellhorn
between the two white peaks of the Wetterhorn, as we
approached Rosenlaui, and the serrated range of precipices
after we had turned the corner towards the Scheideck,
gave me the most impressive conception of the overpower-
ing massiveness of the Alps, as the towering white Jung-
frau, seen in sunset from the Lake of Thun, gave me the
most impressive conception of their stateliness, which I got
anywhere in Switzerland. But greatly as I was " awed,
delighted, and amazed" by the grandeur of the Ober-
land, I almost felt as if in the beauty of grandeur Eastern
Switzerland, and especially the Bernina Alps, had the
advantage. There is a lightness of structure in their
mountain peaks, a variety of colour in the rock of which
they are composed, and a brilliancy about the atmosphere
of those very high valleys, which robs their magnificence
of anything like menace or gloom. In the Oberland by
climbing doubtless you can get an atmosphere as rare and
brilliant, and as favourable to intensity of colour, but only
by climbing; and even then the mountains are cast in a
more heavy, gigantic, and monotonous mould, and each one
resembles the others more closely in mass and make. ItA WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.

is difficult to get anything like the same varieties of colour
and form within the circle of any one horizon, For
airiness of sublimity, I have seen no mountain landscapes
like those of Pontresina. If you want mountains that
seem earthly rivals to divine power—mountains such as
might have been in the prophet's thought when he called
on them, as " the strong foundations of the earth," to hear
" the Lord's controversy "—mountains, again, such as
suggested to Isaiah the yearning, " Oh that thou wouldest
rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the
mountains might flow down at thy presence,19 the Oberland
is the place to see them. But if you want the beauty of
majesty without crushing and overwhelming mass, if you
want mountains as you might* conceive them born and
ordered in the perfect light and spaces of the Divine
Mind, before they were moulded of our heavy earth, then
I think there is no Swiss scenery anywhere to compare
with that of Pontresina.

Our expedition to the Faulhorn was a more ludicrous
and more dangerous failure than that to the Piz Lan-
guard. We injudiciously took on our tired horses beyond
the Scheideck, instead of going up on foot, and before
long I was sitting calmly on the turf at some distance
below the path, and my horse lying on its side a few feet
above me. The guide, who was, I fear, half asleep, had
led him over the edge. I was not hurt, but my nerves
were torn, and my riding-habit torn off. Indeed, my
outward garment was now a petticoat—seemly indeed for
a petticoat, but not the less obviously a petticoat. I
wanted to turn back at once, but Edward, who was as74

A WIFE ON HER TRA VELS.

much alarmed as I, insisted that it was all the guide's
carelessness, and that he would now be warned. Soon
after, however, Edward's own horse quietly lay down for
a roll on a level part of the turf, and then I fairly burst
out crying; but even then Edward prevailed on me to go
on yet farther, for the inn on the Faulhorn was much
larger than that on the Scheideck, it was doubtful if we
could be accommodated at the latter, and we were all but
half-way. But just as the oblique cone of the Faulhorn
came in sight, the mists fell heavily down, and it was
obvious that we should see nothing, even if our guide did
not lose his way; so, to my great satisfaction, Edward let
me dismount, I dried my eyes, and we walked back to the
Scheideck, where the good-natured host evacuated his own
chamber to make room for my exhausted system. The
mists blotted out the whole landscape for the next twenty-
four hours. It was plain that destiny did not favour our
attempts at Alpine ascents.

But I must bring these rambling letters to an end.
To the jEismeer we did succeed in climbing on foot, in spite
of all our failures, and that alarming " near vicinity of
an abyss" with which "Badeker" threatened me:—

" Potent was the spell that bound me,

Not unwilling to obey;

For blue ether's arms flung round me
Stilled the pantings of dismay."

It was indeed a sweet blue ether, which seemed to pene-
trate every pore of life on that grand field of white snow
and deep blue crevasse, to which my heroic .heart had
led me, lest Edward, going alone, should pay the forfeit
of his rashness with his life.A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.	75

A sunset on the Lake of Thun, more than realising the
dreams of Swiss lakes which those painted Swiss brooches
of my childhood had conjured up in my childish imagina-
tion ; a day in simple, busy, beautiful Berne, and a
mayonnaise there which raised for me, in one great lift,
the whole level of my imagination with respect to the
possibilities of earthly cookery; dissolving views of the
Rhine and the Rhine hills, of railway refreshment-rooms,
with huge but delicate partridges waiting for appetites
which ten hours of fasting had sharpened; of a gay
meeting with one of the greatest writers and some of the
most brilliant talkers of the day at Coblentz; of pic-
turesque belfries seen at Ghent and Bruges in hurried
glimpses from the coupe of an express train; of a dark
sea, and deep blue starlit sky eclipsed by rolling clouds
of dirty smoke ; of the blurred lights of Dover Harbour
separating into a row of brilliant points as we approached;
of familiar chalk Downs, of mighty London looking
brighter than its wont; of a well-known common, a
homely cottage, and three dear forms, their hair stream-
ing in the wind, and three tails wagging vigorously as
they rushed to meet us,—and our journey was over!
There they bounded on together, my high-spirited,
faithful Romp, my beloved little Trot, my heart's own
Colin !

" These three made unity so sweet,

My frozen heart began to beat
With something of its ancient heat."

I am, Sir, &e.,

A Wife Not on Her Travels.THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF A
HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.I.

Thun, Monday, September 7, 1868.

A FTER all, in spite of two great disadvantages, one
; casual,—that I was so oppressed with a variety of
cares on leaving home that I had almost lost the power of
enjoyment,—and one natural,—that I am constitutionally
impatient, and apt to lose the beauty of one moment or
scene in hurrying on towards another which is still dis-
tant,—I think I shall get the full benefit of my holiday.
Already Mr. Disraeli's pinchbeck patriotism has ceased
to disturb my imagination; his belief that he was on the
eve of a policy which would " heal the sorrows of afflicted
centuries," and was playing a great part in a truly
" awful dispensation," with respect to the trial of the Irish
Church by a reformed constituency, begin to[ seem rather
silly than sickening; and even the resolve of my own
constituency to return a politician who admires all I
most despise and despises all I most admire, is beginning
to be remembered like a past headache which need
trouble one no more, unless it be in what the Prime
Minister calls the "historical conscience." There are,
indeed, troubles which no mountains and no vistas of
lake, however lovely, will throw into the background;8o

THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

but it is strange how much more easily the mind finds its
true relation even to these in perfect rest amongst scenes,
forms, and colours which raise instead of fretting the
imagination, than amidst those constant and petty strains
upon the attention which make up the mass of human
business. Mr. Arnold reproaches us English that

" We see all sights from pole to pole,

And glance and nod, and bustle by,

And never once possess our soul
Before we die.".

But for my part, I think the one great magic of scenes of
the higher order of beauty, is .that they awaken and
arrest the whole mind, and help, even compel, us some-
times " to possess our soul before we die." At least, this
is my experience; and I fancy it is in some degree the
spell which draws so many of us to Wales, or Scotland,
or Switzerland, or Norway, year after year.

I am not going to trouble you with a minute descrip-
tion of scenes described by thousands of travellers, but
only to give you for two or three weeks an account of the
more interesting moments of travel. I suppose nobody
enjoys railway journeys, least of all this year when rail-
way journeys have been very like the descriptions one
reads of Indian dust storms. But we should have enjoyed
the night passage to Dieppe on Saturday week if poor
human nature could enjoy anything without getting its
natural sleep at the stated intervals. It was intolerable
in the cabin, and we could not get a mattress on deck.
Yet in spite of some amiable girls who quarrelled steadily
as long as they could keep their eyes open, with eachA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.	81

other and with, their governess, we enjoyed for some time
the brilliant trails of moonlight on the still water, and the
white gleams on the passing sails of the Channel fishing
boats. The quarrelsome girls themselves amused me
not a little. One of them—I will call her " Sophia "—
had been invited by the other's parents to spend six
weeks, and the frankness of the young lady who was to
play the part of hostess was very humorous. She took
a very early opportunity of begging Sophia not to compel
her to wish on the very first night of the sweet communion
opening before them, that she (Sophia) might fall over-
board, and so violently anticipate the fervently desired
conclusion. Sophia, on her side, was not much less
compromising. Her stumpy and obstinate features are
framed in my mind in the most glorious framework of
colour; for early on Sunday morning, while the whole
eastern horizon was shooting up bright orange rays on
one side of us, and the full moon was setting in what
seemed preternaturally large dimensions on the other side,
a sturdy little tramp beside me revealed Sophia again on
the alert, and ready to dispute with her schoolfellow and
governess the right to the first " wash" directly the
stewardess should be sufficiently awake to prepare one for
anybody. The last words which I heard uttered by this
vigorous young lady were an imprecation on her hospit-
able schoolfellow's light jacket. After we had landed at
Dieppe, we chanced to go to the same inn, and the sun
was by that time very powerful. The young lady who
was to entertain Sophia expressed her intention of retiring
to change her light jacket, on which Sophia exclaimed,

G82 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

"Bother her light jacket!" And so, encircled in my
memory in the rarest colours of moonlight and of dawn,
but with a nature and disposition formed expressly to
bother intrepidly her friend's light jacket, or anything
else that was hers, she remains to me a sort of type of
the exceedingly limited humanity for which so glorious a
theatre is so often provided on our earth.

We have no very delightful associations with Rouen or
with Paris this year. At Rouen, indeed, the same bright
moon which had irradiated Sophia's countenance rose
glorious behind the double spire of St. Ouen's, most
impressive of Norman churches; but the pleasure this
sight gave us was so closely followed by the only nightly
terrors we have yet experienced,—punaises the French
delicately and most accurately term them, for certainly
they are punitive even of the desire for rest,—and this
though our inn was strongly recommended by three con-
current authorities, that Rouen is at present a name of
repulsion to us. Paris was hot to suffocation by day-
time. One delightful drive we had by moonlight in the
Bois de Boulogne, amidst troops of gaily lighted carriages,
and beside a lake sprinkled with boats in which those
coloured paper lanterns with which I have seen the
Grand Canal at Venice made to blaze like fire, shot
merrily about. But beyond this, Paris was too suffo-
cating to enjoy. The Jardin des Plantes was as dry and
yellow as our own little lawn at home. The great hippo-
potamus was the only thing in Paris which sepmed to
care to open its mouth for anything but drink; but it
was obviously hungry, came up to the surface of itsA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.	83

pond, and took great pains to open its enormous jaws
wide enough to give the blue-bloused French ouvriers a
chance of throwing their tributes of bread and cake into
its mouth from the distance of fifteen yards or so at which
the railing kept them.

We followed Mr. Arnold's steps to the grave of Heine
in Montmartre, for in some measure Mr. Arnold's fine
verses on his grave, and in greater measure Heine's
own strange genius, its mixture of German passion and
Parisian wit, of cynical ribaldry and wild poetical fire,
had interested me in seeing even the place where his
body lies. But the sight was one of pure melancholy.
It was, indeed, a burial-place befitting a cynic rather than
a poet. The stone, with merely " Henri Heine " on it,
stands in a wilderness of dreary tablets and hideous
monuments. Not a blade of turf is near it, or as far as
we could see, is to be found in Montmartre at all. Where
Mr. Arnold's " smooth-swarded alleys " are gone to, we
could not imagine. There, indeed, are his avenues of
limes " touched with yellow by hot summer," but the
"shadow and verdure and cool" were nowhere, and I
doubt if there is a blade of green grass in the place. The
"crisp everlasting flowers, yellow and black, on the
graves," were there, sure enough, and gave a singularly
artificial effect to the signs of lamentation. The elabo-
rate bead-work, the wreaths of tinsel and of bugles, with
their metallic glitter and fade company air, seemed to me
to make Montmartre uglier and less homely even than
our own dismal Kensal Green. As we fled from the
fierce sun which beat down upon those hideous rows ofs4 7HE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

theatrically dressed-up tombstones, I felt that Heine, the
bitterest of cynics, was fitly buried here, but that the
most magical of German poets,—in his magic of lan-
guage surpassing, I think, even Goethe,—had found no
fit resting-place. " Trim Montmartre !" says Mr. Arnold :
I should have said " haggard Montmartre !" Even the
Jews' burial-place at Prague, though it has a much more
utterly forlorn and desolate, has not nearly so artificial
and flaunting an air as these long^necked tombs with
their cheap bead necklaces round them. However, Heine's
black stone stood decently blank, and without any of the
gewgaws of artificial grief clinging to it, and seemed to
me to mock the grimaces of mourning in its neighbour-
hood, as he would have mocked them when living.

What a contrast is Montmartre to the rustic, simple,
and lovely little churchyard here at Thun! which I
must go out of my way a little to mention in this
connection. Of all the places that have managed to
make death seem lovely and homelike, Thun has suc-
ceeded best, better even than any of the lonely old yew-
shaded English churchyards that I love so well. If there
were a Swiss Wordsworth, he should lie here : it would be
even a more glorious resting-place than his own at Rydal.
Everybody knows Thun, which the unknown and homely
poet Hausan has, I think, not ill characterized in one of
his couplets, which I may translate thus,—

" In Thun beside the rushing Aar,

Thun close-packed, busy, bright, bizarre; "

—and every one who knows the main street of Thun,A HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.	85

with its fourfold row of well-filled but diminutive shops,
knows, I hope, the covered staircase out of it, which leads
up the hill to the quaint little church and churchyard.
What a place of rest is that! The churchyard is as
bright as the gayest garden with rose, convolvulus, and
the old-fashioned portulaca. The little crosses over the
simple tombs are wreathed with convolvulus. Over many
a last bed the roses grow with lavish beauty. And then
what a setting there is for this lovely little picture! A
quaint tower at each corner looks over some of the
loveliest and grandest scenery of earth. First, there is
Thun, nestled close beneath beside the foaming Aar, and
the washerwomen's mid-stream huts, with their tenants all
busy at their homely and picturesque work; then the
fierce little river widens out into the lovely lake with the
jagged Stockhorn frowning over it ; and behind that
again the cone of the Niese rises up sheer against the
blue sky ; then, closing the long stretch of varied bay and
headland, are the grand snow-fields of the Bliimlis Alp,
or the Wilde Frau, as the more poetical and homely
popular speech calls her. To the left are the green Alps
and the dotted fir woods which add so unspeakably to the
beauty of the snow summits and the wide glaciers. As
Hausan says,—I can give only my lame translation,—

" The Wilde Frau, in ghostly white,

Ends the long range of lake and height;

While nearer, Alpine pastures bring
Hot August the fresh dress of spring."

And then what a beauty and simplicity in many of the
inscriptions! I found one of which I remember first86 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

hearing as a child at my father's knee after he had first
returned from Switzerland, and which he had copied
from this very churchyard. It was on the death of a
child,—

"Du Blume Gottes wie so friih,

Brach dich des Gartner's Hand!

Er brach dich nicht, er pflanzte sie
Nur in ein bess'res Land."

—which my father had translated, as well, I think, as it
could be translated :—

" Ah! why, thou flower of God beloved,

Plucked thee the Gardener's hand ?

He did not pluck thee, but removed
Into a better land !"

I found the same inscription, but on a child buried only
a year or two ago. The old one seemed to have vanished,
and, I trust, the grief it expressed too. There is no
surer line of tradition than that which preserves the most
perfect and simple words of grief and trust which yester-
day has uttered, for those who need their language to-
day. But I have gone out of my way in order to point
the contrast with Montmartre, with which I was more
than disappointed, — oppressed. Of course one does
not expect a great city to find for its d^ad the lovely
and homely retreats which a little town like Thun can
create. But to me, Highgate, Abney Park, even dismal
Kensal Green, rank far above this stiff, artificial, dressed-
up skeleton of a fashionable world as it wreathes itself in
ghastly finery for the tomb.

How glad we were to escape from sultry Paris!—A HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.	87

brighter, gayer, certainly, but also even hotter than dusty,
old, sultry London. We slept at Dijon, but saw nothing
in the old capital of Burgundy except some very diminu-
tive Burgundian cavalry of to-day, of whom Charles the
Bold would not, I think, have been proud. Yes, we did
see besides a whole regiment of cats, of whom more than
twelve mighty ones belonged to our own inn, and stamped
it with the impress of their unfragrant presence. Indeed,
it was impossible, amidst such a plethora of the felis
domestical not to indulge suspicions of the table d'hote
veal, which, I trust, were groundless. The " heavy and the
weary weight of all this unintelligible world " were not
much lightened till we reached Neuchatel, and then not
immediately, for we reached it late at night; found one of
the three principal inns shut up, and both the others
quite full. There was an omnibus full of us in despair,
including an old Frenchman, who suddenly changed the
elaborate politeness of the previous minute into coarse
denunciations of the unfortunate waiter who communi-
cated the truth, characterizing him as an imbecile and a
fool,—terms which seemed hardly appropriate to a mere
incapacity to create rooms and furniture on the spur of
the moment. The old gentleman's affectionate son had,
however, in the meantime more wisely applied himself to
wheedling the landlady, who made some change in her
domestic arrangements so as to set a bed at liberty ; and
when this was communicated to " papa," as the young
man called him, he instantly smoothed down and was all
politeness again. I persuaded the landlady to obtain us
a lodging at a distance, where I struggled during the88 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

night with an adverse fate in the shape of a spring bed
with the springs broken, so that it gave way in the
middle and doubled me up in a pothook as if it had been
a sitz-bath, a shape in which it is not convenient to sleep.
Still, it was better than the outside of the omnibus, and
probably also than the inside, within which I have some
reason to fear that certain amiable passengers remained
all night. The old Frenchman's wrath with the Neu-
chatel waiter exploded a day or two afterwards in the
only amusing scene I have yet observed at a table d'hote.
It appears that both " papa,"—a heavy, passionate, old,
middle-olass Frenchman, who looked as if he might have
been a retired shopkeeper,—and fils, cherished permanent
wrath against the waiter who had received them with the
unwelcome news of no room. They missed no oppor-
tunity of finding fault with all he brought them, and all
he did. At last, one day, at the table d'hote dinner, the
worm turned against his persecutors. After being twice
told that the dishes he brought were bad,—they seemed
very good to us,—and receiving orders to bring some
other dish needing special preparation in its place, which
he obeyed, he at length, on the third repetition of these
tactics, said by way of reproof that at tables d'hote the
custom was either to eat or to refuse, but not to give
orders. Then the old Frenchman broke loose, launched
his heaviest denunciations at the insolence of the waiter,
and rising in wrath, went down-stairs to the landlady, to
whom he stormed so loud that some of the other guests
rose to shut the door, while opinions were loudly and
freely expressed that the waiter was in the right. InA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.	89

the meantime the son,—a perfectly colourless, sallow*
vtf, carefully dressed young man, with brilliant black
eyes, hair parted in the middle, a well-trained moustache,
and a most amusing habit of winking to himself,-—sat
with his napkin tucked under his chin, rejoicing in the
storm he had created, shrugging his shoulders, picking his
teeth, and bestowing innumerable winks on himself by
way of private approbation, as his " papa's " stormy voice
rose into the salon. He produced upon me the curious
impression of looking as if he were an intellectual puppet-
made expressly for his " papa's" amusement, so com-
pletely different in species did he seem from the coarse
old Frenchman, and yet so utterly devoted to him in
manner. I thought he must have been wound up, and
was going off in a thousand little intellectual tricks and
grimaces, and freaks of countenance and speech, for
"papa's" exclusive enjoyment. Nothing could exceed
the puppet's delight when he had got " papa " to take up
his cause so wrathfully below stairs. It ended, however,
in the defeat of both papa and puppet. Public opinion
was against them, and they left in great wrath the same
evening without greetings on either side.

The first real delight of our holiday was our little
excursion, partly by post carriage, partly by the Jura
" Chemin de Fer Industriel," to the mountain villages of
Hauts Greneveys, Locle, and Brenets, where we saw the
beautiful lake from which the Doubs makes its great leap
of 80 feet. Hauts Geneveys is a village at the top of
a mountain to which the railway, one of the most extra-
ordinary works of its kind, finds its way up by the usual90

THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

zigzags. It commands the most exquisite view of the
wide green Alpine valley called the Yal de Ruz, over
which are sprinkled some thirty cosy little Swiss villages ;
on the opposite side rises up the picturesquely wooded
mountain of Chaumont—spoiled, I regret to say, by a
pension at the summit, where stout young Englishwomen
play at their detestable croquet, instead of enjoying as
they ought the " Sabbath silence of the hills;99 indeed,
the click of that eternal croquet-bat and the usual dis-
putes about the game were the first sounds we heard as
we emerged from the fir woods at the top. But at Hauts
Geneveys there is no such company hotel. There is a
quiet little village inn commanding Chaumont and the
whole Yal de Ruz, and beyond ifc we get a glimpse of
the blue waters of the lake of Neuchatel; and then
again, in the far distance, the gigantic shapes of the
Bernese and the Savoy Alps rise up like ghosts of
their true selves as one sees them in their more imme-
diate neighbourhood. As the evening falls, they gene-
rally emerge from the mist, taking shape above and
beneath the clouds which cling to them. Wow, a sun-
beam falls on a great white glacier, and turns it to the
most exquisite crimson; now, a whole mountain comes
out, apparently wrapped in rosy flame; then, again, they
turn cold and ash-coloured, as the setting sun disappears,
to rekindle just once more in that lovely after-glow which
is due, I suppose, to some reflection from the higher
clouds. And while you gaze at all this lovely, mysterious,
far-off world, the lights begin to twinkle in the innu-
merable villages inhabited by the Swiss watchmakersA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.

close at hand ; the cattle, with their tinkling bells, come
in for the night; the late hay gives out its sweetest
scent; the near green mountains darken and turn to the
richest purple against the pale daffodil of the sky; and
as the stars begin to brighten and multiply, the quaint
old watchman (who is beginning to disappear from the
companyof Switzerland), commences his disturbing
and useless, but expressive and rememberable cries. I
seem to realise better, somehow, the grand scenery amidst
which I am sleeping, when I am roused now and then
during the night by the watchman's periodic report, from
without, that the stars are bright and the hours rolling
on. We enjoyed nothing like Hauts Greneveys till we
got here. It was a glorious vestibule to still more glorious
scenes.

A Working Man in Search of Rest.II.

The Col de Jaman.

Yeyey, September 14, 1868.

E left Thun, and especially its garden churchyard,

with regret; but as the time when we could seek
rest there altogether was not yet, and the town below
swarmed with tourists and pensionnaires, our regret was
tempered with satisfaction at being once more insulated
from that sense of restraint without companionship which
an English entourage abroad without English friends
always produces. It is fagging to overhear such con-
versations as we heard at the table d'hote here to-day,—
which swarms with English. " Where can I get young
peas ? " drawled a dejected American ; " I had them every
day for three weeks in February in Algeria, really ex-
quisite, and have never had them since." " Those waiters
attend to every one but me," complains an unprotected
female on the other side of us: " garfon, apportez du . . . .
du—I want some cucumber, cucumber, gar£on," which,
as nobody at table had had any cucumber, and there did
not appear any cucumber to be had, and the waiter did
not know what the unhappy lady meant, and qffered toA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.	93

take away her salmon instead of giving her cucumber, was
one more added to the list of the good woman's special
grievances. Well, this sort of thing is fagging; it
destroys all the freshness of travel to have the old mono-
tonies of national imbecility sounded every moment in
one's ears. A foreign language is at least an obscuring
vapour which disguises the petty commonplaces of human
nature, and gives a certain sense of freshness and rest to
life. And the worst of it is that it is only in the inter-
vening spaces of travel, between one famous Swiss place
and another, that one gets rid of this sort of chatter alto-
gether. Even seeing the little well-known peculiarities of
one's fellow-countrymen without hearing them is some-
times fevering work. A beautifully appointed grey suit,
with a perfect wideawake, and the usual cambric sail
drooping in graceful folds behind, flashes past one in one
of the loveliest perhaps of Swiss spots, and is followed
close by a handsome striped lilac dress, straw hat, and
fluttering white feather, surmounted by a brilliant parasol.
The grey suit posts with hasty strides up to the principal
point of view, dashes on to the next, flashes a glance to
the right, to the left, does not tarry a moment anywhere,
is swiftly followed by the striped lilac dress and parasol,
and before you have quite realised where you are, much
less had time to let the grand and rich scene before you
sink into your visionary life, the parasol is rapidly sinking
below the horizon in pursuit of the grey suit, having
" done " the view in 2*007 minutes precisely. This sort
of thing always tends to bring back again the intermit-
tent fever of ordinary life, and we never enjoy our-94

THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

selves so much as when we can give our fellow-tourists the
slip for a day or two, as we did between Thun and Yevey.

The mists hung low as we left Thun in the early morn-
ing by the post, and wound through the pretty Sim-
men thai towards Saanen. We had the honour,—un-
known to us at the time,—of dining with (I believe) the
Due de Chartres and his wife and little girl at Weissen-
berg. We noticed that the travellers at the head of the
table were treated as if they sat at the dais and all the
rest of the company below the salt, and that we did not
uniformly receive even the same dishes which had been
prepared for them. But we did not know till afterwards
that the simple, unpretending-looking people who were
so careful of their blue-eyed little girl were what their
courier called "Prince and Princess of Orleans." We
owed it to them, no doubt, that we had,—I believe for
the only time in Switzerland,—true chamois meat for
dinner. We several times had what was so called, but
my wife, who has a finer taste than I, believed that on all
other occasions it was only goat flesh with sauces made to
give it a gamey flavour. The crumbs which fell to us,
however, from the " Prince of Orleans's " table were, I
believe, the true thing. And we had a sort of imbecile
feeling that it was interesting, if not romantic, to eat
what skips about in such extremely dangerous and pic-
turesque places; that we had gained a new step in life by
eating it; though, in fact, the wild, hunterish associa-
tions of the dish did not make it quite as good as English
venison. How arbitrarily these sort of vague ambitions
assort themselves to different persons! I was amusedA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND95

to find that the republican Swiss pastor who was in the
post carriage with us entertained precisely the same sort
of feeling of having acquired a certain adventitious im-
portance, which ought to have, but did not, make him
feel altogether on a larger scale, by dining with the Due
de Chartres, that we entertained from having consumed
this somewhat rare, and particularly mountainous, food.

From Saanen the post did not go on to Yevey till the
next morning, and as we did not care to go by that long
and circuitous route, but preferred to cross to the Lake of
Geneva on foot by the Col de Jaman, we accepted the
pressing offer of a very lively French voiturier to carry
us on that night to Montbovon, at the foot of the pass.
And certainly, from that point to this, the whole route
has been what Byron called it, " as beautiful as a dream."
I suppose he meant so beautiful that one can scarcely
believe the scene real, and fancies that at any moment a
touch may awaken one to the ordinary common-places of
life. At least, I doubt if I ever had a really beautiful
dream in my life, and from what I have heard of other
people's dreams, I fancy dreams are much oftener gro-
tesque than either beautiful or hideous. But none the
less, all perfect loveliness does produce the effect of
dreaminess on the mind. Is it because the images of a
dream pass before one without any action or concurrence
of one's own will,—which in sleep is in abeyance,—
and that the same utter hush of our own restless,
fussy, little individuality is caused by the passing of a
great number of lovely or sublime forms before us which
we drink in solely through the eyes ? As we drove out96 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

of Saanen a misty and clouded day was clearing into
a soft, brilliant evening. To our left the ragged Ruble-
horn and the Chamois' Tooth (Dent de Chamois) rose
up above the pine woods; far beneath us, on the right,
flowed the swift Sarine ; and behind us, in the far distance,
some great mountain—I believe the Daube, the highest
point of the celebrated Gemmi Pass—catching the setting
sun, towered up a furrowed cone, bathed in pale, soft
flame. As we approached the Gorge de la Tine, a grand
deep gorge, like a miniature Fiinstermunz, or a gigantic
Matlock, one of the two horses in the carriage fell sud-
denly flat on his side, close to the edge of an ugly enough
precipice. Our chattering French driver—at Saanen we
passed again from the German-speaking to the French-
speaking cantons of Switzerland—who had looked behind
him to introduce to us the various mountains and other
objects of interest much more than at his horses' feet,
jumped down and helped his horse, which was not hurt,
up again, and then immediately devoted himself to ex-
plaining elaborately to us his own perfect freedom from
responsibility for the accident. "Faites attention, Mon-
sieur ! " (he had discovered that we only understood him
by the help of the closest attention), " le cheval a mis son
pied sur une grosse pierre, une tres-grosse pierre," and so
on—the lively man, entirely undisconcerted, continuing,
to my wife's dismay, to demand a great deal more atten-
tion from us than he gave, though darkness was falling
fast, to his horses. However, we were soon safely in the
pleasant Hotel de Jaman, at Montbovon, talking our
imperfect French to the most gracious of landladies, andA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.

explaining our need for a guide up to the Col the next
morning. Lovely was the quince jelly with which that
landlady—that landlady alone hitherto—graced her hos-
pitable board, and pleasant were the dreams from which
the howling wind and flapping Venetian shutters awakened
us to fear that our expedition was- hopeless; but at five
next morning, the benignant voice at our door prophesied
" beau temps," and assured us that in all weathers the
wind howled like that round the hotel at Montbovon; so
we were soon deep in the quince jelly again, and soon
afterwards climbing or descending (for there was quite as
much descending as climbing till we got close to the pass)
the wet green meadows, or slipping along the stony mule
path which leads from Montbovon to Allieres and the
Jam an. At last, as we issued from a fir wood, we saw, to
our left hand, the striking mountain which Mr. Arnold
has both sculptured and painted for us, in his beautiful
verses, new and old, concerning, the author of "Ober-
mann "

4 4 But stop! to fetch back, thoughts that stray
Beyond this gracious bound,

The cone of Jaman, pale and grey,

See in the blue profound.

" Ah! Jaman, delicately tall,

Above his sun-warmed firs,

What thoughts to me his jocks recall,

What memories he stirs ! "

Subsequently, from the lake here, we have seen, not the
" cone," for that is rather a misnomer, but the tapering
form of Jaman, "pale and grey, rise in the blue pro-
found;" but our first glimpse of him was of "Jaman,

H98 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

delicately tall, above his sun-warmed firs," for the early
sun had just caught that unique shape, and caught it
on the side on which the firs grow close up to the very
summit. There are plenty of peaks and cones, and plenty
of needles (aiguilles), among the Alps of the Canton
of Yaud, and of the Yalais; but we have nowhere seen
another Jaman. Instead of rising, like an ordinary
conical peak, from a broad base that may be roughly
called circular, the form of Jaman (as it springs from the
ridge, over which the Col de Jaman passes) is that of one
of the old stone spear heads, or javelin heads, which slope
up, not quite into a point, but into a narrow end like the
end of a chisel. So the Dent de Jaman, as it is called—
but it is too "delicately tall" for any tooth, even an
incisor—tapers up to a narrow, but not pointed, summit.
The face which is turned towards the Lake of Geneva
is bare and precipitous; but the fir-clad sides are covered
with soft turf as well as trees, and on that under which
we passed, it may be asceuded by any one with good lungs
in about an hour and a half, from the top of the pass.
Wherever, Jaman is visible, as we have since found, even
at this wonderful upper end of the Lake of Geneva,—

" Where the domed Yelan, with his snows
Behind the upcrowding hills,

Doth all the heavenly opening close
Which the Ehone's murmur fills,"—

the eye settles and rests upon him at once. There are
scores of loftier and grander summits on every side, but
he has the stamp of highest beauty, the undeniable
quality of "distinction." As we toiled up, in a sun nowA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.

99

beginning to burn hotly, for it was nine o'clock, towards
the chalets of the Plan de Jaman, we heard voices eagerly
answering each other from opposite sides of the glen, and
soon afterwards, the vehement barking of a dog. Oar
guide, with the most intense animation, told us that
chamois had just been sighted among rocks above the fir-
woods on the opposite side of the valley, and that two
Swiss hunters were in pursuit. Soon we reached a chalet,
where we were glad enough to rest awhile and drink the
mountain milk and cream. What a picture it was! A
smouldering wood fire, sending up a cloud of blue smoke,
is burning on the stone floor of the dark little room;
round it a very handsome, frank-looking Swiss herdsman,
with his wife and two pretty children, are grouped, eating
out of a roun4 dish their breakfast of curdled cream;
these we join in attacks upon their milk and cream, while
our guide tells them the evidently exciting news of the
chamois, which they begin to discuss eagerly in very
rapid and unintelligible French. Presently, when we
had rested about a quarter of an hour, the two hunters,
with their guns and dog, came in, hot and dejected.
They had lost the track, they said, but their dog had
overtaken one of the chamois—which they supposed must
have been sick, or previously injured—and had been
wounded by it, in proof of which they showed a hurt on
the dog's head. The hunters, the herdsman, and our
guide discussed the subject with the same excitement, far
more than the earnestness, and probably much the same
sort of fruitless result, as a knot of members in the lobby
of the House of Commons display in discussing a minis-THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

terial statement; the dog stood by, wagging his tail, and
regarding himself as the hero of the morning; while the
goats peeped round the corner of the chalet to hear the
news, and the cows in their adjoining sheds gently tinkled
their bells by way of a little musical accompaniment.
By ten we were eating our lunch at the summit of the
pass, where we were to part from our guide; but we had
not yet got our view of the lake below us. We were
sorry to part company, for though our communications
with the good Swiss were by no means of the freest, he
had so kindly and simple a nature that his society was
very pleasant. It was very amusing to see him looking
through my opera-glass. He had never used one before
in his life, and asked which end to apply to his eye. His
delight was quite childlike. He laughed to himself
perpetually, and kept saying, as he caught each familiar
object, " Ah ! c'est tout pres," with a separate chuckle of
satisfaction as he found the same effect produced in each
separate case. He cannot have been a guide of the higher
order, or the use of the telescope would have been per-
fectly familiar to him; and I do not think he was. Still
he had the slight hacking cough which almost all the
professional guides seem to me to have. I doubt if any
of their chests can stand for a whole lifetime the exertion
of daily ascents, often with considerable burdens on their
backs which necessitate a stoop.

A few steps downwards—we were still directly under
the stately head of Jaman—and the most lovely landscape
which either of us had ever beheld, I think, broke upon
us: the fresh, still, tender blue of the Lake of GenevaA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.

shining in the morning sun, with soft, little islands of
feathery-white mist strewn over its surface, as well as over
the bright green alps sloping gently at our feet; farther
off, where the lake widened out westward towards Geneva,
it was free from mist, but the blue shade of the water
turned to white as it receded from the eye; and then
beyond Geneva, on the extreme western horizon, lay,
almost like a bank of high cloud, the long chain of the
Jura. It was the near end of the lake that was so exqui-
site a picture, and yet but for the air, and space, and
light, and freedom of the almost sea-like western levels,
with their comparatively low shores, it would not have
had half the loveliness. Straight before us, range on range
of mountains grew up in curious involution before the
eye; there were the distant snows of the great St. Ber-
nard, the host of mountains which border the Yalais, and
at our.feet the richly-wooded rocks of Naye, and the
shining green meadows through which we had to pass on
our way downwards to Montreux. I have never seen
anything like the tender blue of the lake itself as it was
then—nearer, perhaps, to the delicate blue of very thin
wood smoke on a bright day than any other tint I know ;
but this was in such exquisite contrast with the curling
white mist which floated upon it or rose off it in soft
islands here and there, and with the single white sail which
was skimming slowly over it, coasting the southern shore,
and with the yellow sand-bank stretching out into the
lake near the mouth of the Rhone, that the tint seemed to
us a perfectly new one, created for the sleeping lake
beneath us, and proper to no other spot of sea or sky.THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

We sat down on the warm turf among those lovely lilac
crocuses, which are at once the commonest and gayest of
August flowers in the Alps, and dreamt of building us a
chalet under the shadow of that spear-headed mountain
for indeed it seemed good for us to be there. We could
not think without something like passion of Mr. Arnold's
exquisite picture of the author of " Obermann " :—

" How often, when the slopes are green
On Jaman, hast thou sate
By some high chalet-door and seen
The summer day grow late,

4 4 And darkness steal o'er the wet grass
By the pale crocus starred,

And reach that glimmering sheet of glass
Beneath the piny sward,

" Lake Leman's waters, far below,

And watched the rosy light
Fade from the distant peaks of snow,

And in that air of night

" Heard accents of the eternal tongue
Through the pine branches play;

Listened, and felt thyself grow young,

Listened, and wept—away !"

And away at last we were compelled to go, down through
shady woods, and hot shining meadows, and stony moun-
tain roads, and pleasant orchards, till we passed the new
staring villas of Grlion, and were told by a worthy old
Swiss woman with a peaked straw hat, who condoled with
my wife on her sore feet and long walk, that the wonder
and beauty of the neighbourhood was the great new hotel
and pension Company of Grlion (limited), which it wouldA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND. 103

be well for us to take a carriage from Montreux expressly
to see! Before we reached Montreux, clouds were gather-
ing heavily on the opposite mountains, and long ere we
arrived here, the thunder rolled and lightning flashed,
while—

" That much-loved inland sea,

The ripples of whose blue waves cheer
Yevey and Meillerie,"

had turned black and white with storm and foam, and was
tossing in that cruel mood in which it swamped, a week
later, the boat of an English clergyman here, and swal-
lowed up half his family before his eyes.

A Working Man in Search of Rest.III.

Yeyey to Sixt.

Sixt, September 21, 1868.

URELY there is 110 more curious working of the
human mind than that which gives rise to the
varieties of costume, and to the most opposite varieties
sometimes in such close proximity to each other. An old
master of mine once maintained that the words for
" good " and " bad " in all languages are identical in root
(I forget the exact philological reasoning, but it some-
how connected the Latin words for " bad " and " worse "
malm and pejor, with the roots of the Greek words for
"better" and "best," ajieivwv and (jeXriGros), and this
he used to explain humorously by assuming two hostile
savage tribes separated by a river. "Whatever the one
thought good, the enemy thought bad, till at last the
word for " good " on one side of the border came to mean
" bad " on the other, and wee versa. I was reminded of
this enterprising philological feat when we passed from
the Canton of Yaud to that of the Yalais. In Yaud we
had seen the peasant women with sugar-loaf straw hats,
closely resembling the most perfect of their own conical
peaks, and possibly imitated from them. As we sat byA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND. 105

the Lake of Geneva at Bouveret, wondering how long it
would take the Rhone to push back the bright blue
waters at our feet another mile or two with its delta of
yellow sand, as it has already pushed them back through
the distance between "Port Valais,"—now a port no
more,—and Bouveret, a figure emerged from a train just
arrived from the Valais and stepped on to the steam-
boat, on which my wife gazed in dumb astonishment for
a minute or two, before she drew my attention to the
wonderful head-dress upreared upon it. It looked at first
like a tin pot of the shape of a carpenter's paper cap, but
on more deliberate inspection I should say it was rather
an irregular seven- or eight-sided solid (a heptahedron
or octohedron) than a cube; and I suppose its metallic
appearance was given by silk, or shiny paper, stiffened
with pasteboard, and not by any film of actual metal.
The head-dress in question was the colour of bright japan
metal, striped with brilliant blue, and a clumsier penthouse
I never saw. It was most of all, perhaps, like an orna-
mental dog-kennel in miniature, or a doll's bureau,
executed in japan metal; but we saw these structures
afterwards in Champery in all-colours, black as com-
mon as any,—a colour in which they looked at once
lugubrious and hideous. What can induce any one to
wear such things ? Fashion, of coupe; but what can
cause the fashion ? Our " chimney-pot" hats are nothing
to them. If, indeed, we wore hats representing chimney
pots, with all those remarkable appendages—" cowls,"
are they not capriciously termed?—added to chimney-
pots in order to prevent the chimneys from smoking, thereio6 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

might be some analogy. But even then we could scarcely
imagine women making life hideous by adopting them.
These women of the Yalais are no doubt victims of
tradition and public opinion. But the origin of such a
tyrannical tradition, the fountains of such a depraved
public opinion, deserve special investigation. Was it
originally a sort of challenge to the sugar-loaf hats of
the Yaudois women ? Did this truncated pyramid bid
defiance to the hostile straw steeples, by emulating the
maximum of contrast ? Or was it originally a copy of
some famous bastion which had been successfully defended
by the Canton of Yalais against the Canton of Yaud?
Or could we perhaps suppose them intended to assert
the " manysidedness " of woman's brains as against the
Yaudois upward-pointing spire, which seems to symbolise,
for women, a life only of reverence ? Even so, irregularity
would be a mistake, as equal development on all sides
would be of the essence of this symbol of manysided
energy; and I fancy, too, that the conflict of woman's
rights has never been sharply waged in these latitudes.
It must remain, I suppose, one of the many enigmas of
the most enigmatic of arts, dress.

From Bouveret the train carried us to Monthey, and
there a very modest carriage took us on board for the
journey up the wild Yal d'llliez to Champery. Winding
steeply through rich orchards and chesnut woods, strewed
with great boulders of rock, and leaving the striking
mountains studding the bed of the Rhone to engrave their
bold outlines on the blue background, we wound slowly
along a narrowing valley till we were exactly opposite to,A HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND. 107

and I suppose within easy rifle shot of, the great jagged
row of molar teeth which form the crest of the Dent du
Midi. The mountain itself rises to an absolute height
of above 10,000 feet, and nearly 7,000 above the high
valley in which Champery lies. This great mountain,
with its bare precipices ; its gullies filled with snow,
which, lower down, turn into torrents, dividing, as with
so many white threads, the green face of the mountain as
they fall; with its high-perched alps, on which the
chalets are like dolls' houses and the cattle are hardly
visible to the naked eye ; with its dark fringe of fir forest
half-way down, and its turbid glacier-stream boiling along
the bottom of the glen and separating it from Cham-
pery, is, of course, the one object which fills the eye
and the mind of every stranger in this wild but somewhat
monotonous vale. The terrible-looking double teeth which
run along its summit from east to west terminate in a
westerly peak of much more shapely form, over the
shoulders of which a necklace, or rather, say, a smooth
white cape of glacier, droops in graceful folds on every
side. This glacier, Lesauf, as it is called, though by no
means comparable to any of the finer glaciers of the Alps,
is, by very reason of its small scale, more picturesquely
folded round the single peak in which it originates than
any other I have seen. The system of the larger glaciers
is so great that they embrace many summits instead of
one before their separate ice-streams meet; and usually
they do not meet again, but only ray out from their com-
mon source in arcs of various curvatures, like the various
jets of spray from a single fountain. But this littleio8 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

glacier, springing from behind this western summit of the
Dent du Midi, takes no wide sweep; its two branches
soon meet again in front of it, and then spread down
over its shoulders. The slender peak, with its graceful
and glistening cape of ice, flanked by the higher, more
rugged, and jagged heights farther to the east, and
divided only by a break in the chain from a dark and
solid mountain mass spotted here and there with snow
farther to the west, used to exert a singular fascination
over us, as we took our evening stroll above Champery
towards the Col de Oou. We sat listening to the noisy
torrent, fed chiefly from that white, still glacier, which
rushed wildly down the intervening glen and filled the
whole ravine with its impatience—though not, however,
quite able to drown the melancholy rustle of the fir-trees
above us, or the striking of the Champery clock below—
with eyes fixed on the glimmering white mantle of the
dark peak opposite, till the rushing in my ears ceased to
resemble an angry and noisy torrent, and was transformed
into the voice of the glacier telling the secrets of its
mute and frozen centuries. If you listen intently in the
stillest midnight you will hear something like a rushing
sound,—-a sound as of distant wings,—which my wife
always insists in her paradoxical way on calling " the
silences;" and so, on the other hand, some of these
monotonous mountain-torrents in a still night, issuing
from sheets of snow that glimmer as tranquilly as the
grave, seem to me to pass into the mind and memory,
not as natural music, but as floods of silence. I suppose
this is the same train of feeling as that which made PlatoA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.

say in the "Phsedo" that death feeds life, just as life feeds
death,—a fancy of which these still glaciers and their
tumultuous children often remind one. Anyhow, though
I don't wish to grow fanciful or sentimental, I shall not
soon forget the intensity of silence which seemed to me to
fill the Yal d'llliez on these evenings at Champery,
though the torrent made far more noise than that song of
Wordsworth's "highland lass " whereof he said,—

" Oh listen! for the vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound."

And yet, on the whole, we did not greatly enjoy
Champery. The hotel there is more of a pension than a
hotel, and, moreover, the manager was ill and the con-
cern badly ordered. There were no bells in the rooms,—
only one in each corridor, and when you wanted your
bath in the morning, you had to rush out some thirty
yards with a counterpane round you, and with English
ladies lodging in perhaps every other room of the cor-
ridor, to ring a bell which usually produced no effect
except the vibrations upon your own ears. Then they
didn't put your room to rights till about dinner-time, and
in bad weather, when your choice is between your room
and a saloon full of people you don't know, and with
whom you are compelled to make helpless attempts at
acquaintance, it is a trial to have to choose between
unmade beds and unmade friendships. We were fortu-
nate enough, indeed, before we left, to find some very
pleasant friends' friends, with whom we had many com-
mon interests, and who broke the spell of that reiteratedTHE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

attempt and deadly failure to converse. But in the mean-
time, the English colony was a nightmare, and if we had
not been detained by indisposition, we should have fled
almost immediately. There were the same faces and the
same jokes day after day. There was a wee boy at table,
and there was a good-natured gentleman opposite who
always put on the same jocose face and asked the same
question as to whether he was going to leave him (the jocose
gentleman) any pudding, day after day, till I felt disposed
to begin dinner by begging him to say it at once and
get it over. Then there was great routine joking about
the victuals, which were not perhaps of the best,—
especially I remember a custard pudding in which the
predominant taste was cardamums and castor-oil. Our
only pleasant acquaintances having left the very day we
made each other out, we were quite morbidly eager to
leave, and one very misty morning, the mountains being
quite invisible, and a small rain falling, I had confidence
enough in the barometer, which had risen for twenty-
four hours, to order mules, and solemnly depart amidst the
pitying comments of the English company, who peeped
at us compassionately from the windows and balconies.

My faith in the barometer was fairly rewarded. Before
we reached the top of the Col de Cou the sun was on the
mountains behind us and the broad valley more than half
cleared of mist. But the cold at that height was exces-
sive, and no restauration, however stately, was ever so
welcome to us as the dark little hovel on the summit,
with its hot coffee and open fireplace. As we descended
the beautiful basin below the Col de Cou—-as far as that
break in the mountains which is called the Col de Goleze,A HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.

leading to Samoens and Sixt—the afternoon brightened,
and the Dranse, which was running far beneath us, shone
out in parts like silver. But what bogs we had to traverse !
The heavy rain had saturated the turf, and turned a thick
fir wood, through which our road lay, into a great
dismal swamp. My boots had long been walked into
holes, but the mule was obviously so uncertain about his
footing with me on his back, and remonstrated by so many
grunts, that I dismounted at once, and unfortunately so
did my wife. Yery soon, however, with petticoats as
clammy as if they had been put into a clay pit, and boots
soaked with mud, she had to climb up again, the guide
gallantly allowing her to put her clay-modelled foot into
his hand. As for me, I dashed onward, through the wet
grass where it was possible, through the marsh where it
was not, till boots and trousers alike were neatly cased in
clay, and did not get up again till the mules overtook me
in climbing the Col de Goleze. As we passed the summit,
a short and sharp shower ushered in the softest and
brightest evening of the week,—and what a lovely scene
lay before us ! To our left the grand perpendicular pre-
cipices of the Goleze, rising many hundred feet above the
great height at which we were; before us soft green
slopes stretching for miles, but divided towards the
bottom of the valley by a huge and steep rocky hill,
blackened with thick fir woods, to the right of which lay
Samoens and to the left our road to Sixt. On the other
side of the bright valley of Samoens and Sixt, the moun-
tains rose up again, crowded with dark fir forests. As
we got nearer the valley, passing into it through a narrow
rocky pass, the loveliest of waterfalls, flushed with theTHE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

recent rains, came into view on the opposite mountain
beyond the Giffre; and soon after we had turned into the
valley and begun ascending the course of the Giffre, the
great Pointe de Salles, with its lofty head pushed forward
till it seemed to jut right over the bed of the river, though
many thousand feet above it, shut in the southern horizon.

How glad we were to reach this quaint old convent,
which is now the principal inn in Sixt,—the Hotel du
Fer-a-Cheval, as it used to be called, from the horse-
shoe valley about four miles above; the Hotel des
Cascades, as it is called, with even greater appropriate-
ness, now. It is the most hospitable of inns, the open
stone hearths admitting of that greatest of luxuries, a
blazing wood fire, the long corridors speaking of its old
conventual days, and the old-fashioned frescoes round the
walls of the rooms, with processions of birds flying
formally, two and two, and diminishing by regular steps
from the size of eagles to the size of sparrows, calling up
faint reminiscences of the Noah's arks of one's infancy.
Yesterday, thoroughly rested from our labours, we spent
in exploring some of the exquisite waterfalls of the valley,
and the strange natural amphitheatre of rock a few miles
above us. The valley abounds in waterfalls of every kind,
all now full with the rains. Water falling more than a
thousand feet with a widely scattered fan-like spray,—
water bounding in great, long, fierce, almost horizontal
leaps, looking like a staircase of very low, broad, white,
boiling steps,—water descending in a single thread-like
column for hundreds of feet, then divided by a rock into
separate falls, finally changing its course altogether, andA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND. 113

shelving away in broken rapids to the valley,—all these
varieties, and many varieties of these varieties, have we
seen in this wonderful valley. But after all, these shining
waterfalls are only the gems in which greater beauties
are set. We have seen nothing in Switzerland grander
than the amphitheatre of rock,—or cirque, as it is called
in the Pyrenees,—which they term the Fer-a-Cheval.
Sheer limestone precipices of many hundred feet (over
which my wife counted no less than fourteen waterfalls,
all visible at the same moment), shut in a gigantic amphi-
theatre of soft green turf,—swelling into green hills
round the base of the rocks where landslips have
repeatedly fallen from above. Behind these gigantic
precipices, again, great mountains tower up, of which the
Pic de Tinneverges and the Tete Noire are the most
magnificent; and at one point the great glaciers of Mont
Buet peep over, just suggesting the desolation and
grandeur of the wild plateau between the summits of the
rocks and the base of the higher peaks. I could fancy
that it might have been in such a scene as this, which
looks like the vestibule of a higher world, that Jacob, his
eyes just closed on ladders of rock which seem to lead
from earth to sky, and on delicate clouds of spray floating
for ever, like angels' wings, around them, might have
dreamed that wonderful dream which Rembrandt has
conceived and painted for us till we seem almost to dream
it ourselves,—the dream from which he awoke saying,
" How dreadful is this place ! This is none other but
the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven."

A Working Man in Search of Rest.

1IV.

To Chamounix.

Chamotoix, September 28, 1868.

O HUT up by torrents of rain the last day of our stay at
Sixt, and meditating with some alarm on the exceed-
ingly porous membrane which now alone stood between
my feet and the drenched earth, I communicated with
a Sixt cobbler on the subject of mountain boots, and
obtained for sixteen francs a pair weighing about as much
as the rest of my manly person in its ordinary accoutre-
ments, so that when standing in them I felt very much
like those loaded figures in toy shops which are made to
illustrate the principle of stable equilibrium,—or as
astronomers tell one that one would feel if suddenly
clapped down on the planet Jupiter, and subjected to the
enormous additional attraction of its mighty bulk. How-
ever, they were a vast comfort in the mule journey over
the Col d'Anterne and the Col de Brevent; and, though
adding a good deal to the physical effort of raising my
legs, yet as I walked only in descending those heights,
each foot was lifted through a much less space than that
through which it fell again to earth, and, of course, as the
gravitating force exerted is " directly as the mass," myA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.

115

loaded feet were drawn downwards by a much more
powerful attraction than they would have been in the
light and (now, alas!) excoriated London boots of my
previous travels. In fact, the momentum acquired by my
boots as falling bodies " in a unit of time," as they used
to say in the books on dynamics, was at times almost
alarming to myself, who was inseparably identified with
their orbit for better or worse, and compelled to pass
through space at the same uniformly accelerated velocity.
But my mule appeared quite insensible even to the joint
weight of my boots and myself. He was strong and
rather mechant, as our guide subsequently admitted, and
I have a fancy that they gave me a mule which they
hoped might give me trouble, because I had positively
declined the useless expense of hiring a couple of guides
as well as a couple of mules. Formerly in Switzerland
you never paid for both horses and guides, unless an
experienced guide were essential for the safety of the
party. Some attendant of the mules or horses accom-
panied them, as a matter of course, to see after them and
bring them back, but nobody ever thought of charging
for the service of such an attendant the full tariff for a
regular guide. But now you can go nowhere with a mule
without having a regular guide, at the full tariff, as well;
and not only so, but if you have more than one mule, a
violent effort is made to force as many regular guides
upon you as you have mules. I steadily resisted this
imposition, even to the point of appealing to the deputy
" Maire " of Sixt, a gentleman in shirt-sleeves, of pleasing
demeanour, to support pie. I stated, to the great disgust116 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

of my guide, in answer to his refusal to be " responsible"
for me if I did not take a separate guide, that if he would
be responsible for my wife and her mule, I was quite
willing to be responsible for myself so far as following
him was concerned. In order to punish me for my
obstinacy, I rather think they gave me a mechant mule;
but if so, their object entirely failed, for a stronger
climber I never mounted, and as far as I was concerned
his bad temper only developed itself in three ways,
general moral energy, which is not unfrequentty a result
of bad temper,—a voracious appetite for grass (he
occupied at least half the time in grazing which his com-
panion and leader occupied in climbing, and still kept up
with her easily),—and lastly, a tendency to run at you
viciously with his head down when you interrupted his
midday meal. The first consequence was agreeable rather
than unpleasant; the second was, at least, highly amu-
sing, if sometimes inconvenient; and the last, though
alarming, did not result in serious consequences. In
truth, my mule interested me greatly. He was exceed-
ingly like the late Lord Brougham, possessing the same
kind of dangerous eye, and long, flexible, expressive nose,
the vibrations of which, in the near proximity of a tempt-
ing piece of turf or bush, were quite a study. When he
rushed at me for attempting to catch him after his mid-
day meal, his nose quivered so like Lord Brougham's,
when vehemently attacking a contemptible foe; that I
asked myself if metempsychosis could be true; and if he
had not appeared in the world some seven years before
the late lord left it, I should have considered it an argu-A HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND. 117

ment of some strength in its favour. He evidently made
a little calculation, before we had left Sixt for five
minutes, of the time he could spare for eating and still
keep up with the leading mule which bore my wife. He
estimated it at just one-half of the whole time of ascent,
and accordingly spent one minute in every two in vora-
cious grazing, and in the other pushed on to his com-
panion's heels. No matter at what angle he happened to be
climbing, even if his fore feet happened to be all but
perpendicularly over his hind, no matter though we had
passed above the region of soft sweet turf, and were
deep in the granite desolation of the mountain top, if
there were a foothold enough for climbing, there was foot-
hold enough for grazing, and though he didn't exactly
eat the granite itself, he grabbed eagerly at any stray
mosses which might have begun the work of carpeting
those wild and rugged and barren summits. I parted
with that mule with real regret,—though dragging him
down the Brevent when he held on by his mouth to every
visible tuft of grass was certainly a work of labour. In
no other living creature have I ever seen, as Lord Lytton
might say in one of those unrivalled passages of medita-
tive philosophy with which his works are gemmed,—" in
no other living creature have I ever seen the twin
principles of Energy and Appetite so absolutely co-ordi-
nated. Usually, in organized beings, they alternate.
Energy gives birth to Appetite, which in its turn regene-
rates Energy. But in this unexampled instance they
were giant Yokefellows, coupled together in the car of
the same vigorous Organization." Don't you think I118 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

have almost risen to the level of Lord Lytton's own
philosophic style ?

The valley was covered with mist, through which the
sun was struggling, as we wound our way up in the early
morning through the pine woods above Sixt, catching
now and then a silver gleam from the waterfalls on the
opposite side of the glen, from the slender thread of the
Rouget, with its branching lower falls, and from the
bright, gentle shelving rapids which the inhabitants have
so happily termed La Pleureuse. The grand brow of the
Pointe de Salles at first only loomed darkly through the
mist, and it was not till we approached Mr. Wills's
beautiful chalet, " The Eagle's Nest," that we could see
much or far. But as we wound above it, and admired
the loveliness of its situation, at once cosy and sublime,
nestling under heights so stupendous that those over
which it towered, grand as they were in themselves,
looked comfortable and homelike in the comparison, the
sun came full out on the great mass of the Buet, and by
the time that " The Eagle's Nest " had begun to look to
us more like a lark's nest than an eagle's, so close to the
very floor of the valley was it thrown from the great
height from which we looked down upon it, the great
glaciers of the Buet were glittering under a brilliant sky.
Even then, however, the mists which clung round the
Buet's lower levels behind us, and which kept sweeping
capriciously over the precipitous range of the Chaine des
Fys before us, now blotting it out for a moment, now
dropping till the solid and barren summits seemed all
built on mist, threatened a day by no means uniformlyA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.

clear; and we felt that we were fortunate in having had
any satisfying views of the beautiful valley stretching
away far beyond Samoens into a deep blue distance be-
hind us, and of the imposing and massive mountain,
whose heavy, glaciered summits seemed so near and so
little above us, though its height is really far greater
than any we reached. And, in fact, the mists spread
again soon after midday, so that when we reached the
desolate slanting grooves, rather than paths, in which
the mules had to clamber and slide along at the top of
the pass, the mist wrapped us close and struck cold upon
us, and I feared that the grand prospect of Mont Blanc
for which we hoped, might prove a total failure. In the
meantime, we had to pass through the wild basin in
which the green little Lac d'Anterne lies like an emerald
set in the roughest stone. It was comparatively warm
and cheerful in that sheltered little basin, and beside the
green lake grew the richest bed of that brilliant little
gentian which the botanists call Gentiana JBavarica which
we ever came upon among the Alps. The dark green
water of the tarn was bordered by a bright green turf, on
which the dark blue (ultramarine blue, I suppose it would
be called) of these brilliant little flowers sparkled as thick
as ever did buttercups in an English meadow. And then
above this ring of richly covered turf, the bleak, slaty,
inhospitable sides of the basin rose steep on every side, at
one side the jagged perpendicular ridge of the Anterne
towering above it. Not a tree, not a bush was there;
only the deep and shining little green lake, its soft and
flowery border of turf, and the jagged, shelving sides,THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

with here and there a petty patch of frozen snow or ice
adding to the bleakness of tone, without being large
enough for individual effect. The whole scene produced
on us the most curiously vivid image of imprisoned
beauty,—of loveliness set in a shell of stern and barren
desolation.

As we filed out of the little basin of the Lac d'Anterne
to the edge of the Col, we ought to have come upon a
magnificent view of Mont Blanc and his neighbours.
But the mists were driving wildly about, and we only saw
the great white-seamed peak of the Aiguille du Midi
rising now and then out of the mist, then lost in it again.
Here we descended from our mules, for we had a very
steep valley before us, to climb down to the bottom of the
cup, as it were, between the Ant erne and Brevent, before
ascending the latter. Half-way down we came on a little
fresh green plateau, where we stopped to feed the mules
and to eat our own lunch, and fortunately the sun came
out warm while we performed that refreshing operation.
Then onwards we plunged again down and down through
the spongy track,—barberries, wild raspberries, wild
cineraria (or something very like it) growing thick on
every side, and the steep mountains rising all round, with
now and then the white-ribbed Aiguille du Midi gleam-
ing over the side of the ravine. We were not sorry at
last to mount again, though the path up which we had to
wind ran for some time so close to the edge of the preci-
pice that my wife needed all her nerve to ride. For three
good hours we zigzagged up the side of the mountain,
passing nothing living but a few black pigs and theA HO LID A Y IN S WITZERIA ND. 12 r

tenant of one lonely chalet, who seemed thankful for a
chance of communication with the external world and
eagerly asked us the time, till, at about five o'clock, we
reached the wilderness of boulders and glacier on the
summit,—a scene of desolation so unmitigated that my
wife called out we had got to the end of the world. The
wind was high and intensely cold, the mist drove past us
through the draughty clefts of the rocks, like whiffs of
smoke, the starlings rose in whirlpools, the marmot
screamed, and even my voracious mule could find neither
moss nor herb to snatch at. It was as perfect a realisa-
tion as it was possible to meet with of the old rhymes,—

" In puffs the wild wind hurried through
That ice-patched world of rock and sky;

In swirling clouds the starlings flew,

And lonely broke the marmot's cry."

We hurried to the edge of the Col. A world of dense
mist was before us. Our guide shrugged his shoulders.
" II n'y a rien k voir," he said, and so it was. Gloomily
we dismounted from our mules and gazed at the cruel
mist which hid such mighty shapes. Even as we gazed,
it partly rose. The curtain drew up so far that we
saw the four great monster glaciers sweeping down in
great curvilinear segments into the very valley of Cha-
mounix, and divided by mountains which under the
shadow of that hanging mist looked preternaturally black.
It was a marvellous sight, even though the mountains
still hid their heads, and only the great irruptions of
glacier, the startling blue and white of the four huge but122 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

grandly curved promontories of ice, betrayed the frozen
heights from which they were fed. It was the very view
which Shelley might have had when he wrote, in his fine
ode to Mont Blanc,

" The glaciers creep,

Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains
Slowly rolling on."

We were compelled to be satisfied and begin our steep
descent. But we had better fortune in store. As we
stopped for some hot coffee at the Plam-Praz, about half
an hour's walk beneath the summit, and about two hours
still above Chamounix, precisely over which we were
poised throughout our descent, the mists drew off, first
at the western end of the valley, leaving Mont Joli and
the Aiguille and Dome du Goute brilliantly clear, and
then the great, solid head of Mont Blanc itself was unco-
vered before us. Somehow, by its mass, solidity, and
grandeur, and the human kingliness of its statuesque
repose, it kept haunting me oddly enough as resembling
Shakespeare standing among his brother-poets. Perhaps,
though I had utterly forgotten the lines, I was really
thinking of Matthew Arnold's fine sonnet on Shake-
speare,—

" Others abide our question. Thou art free.

We ask and ask : thou smilest and art still,

Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill
That to the stars uncrowns his majesty,

Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,

Making the Heaven of Heavens his dwelling-place,

Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foiled searching of mortality.A HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND. 123

And thou who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honoured, self-secure,

Didst walk on earth unguessed at. Better so !

All pains the immortal spirit must endure,

All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow,

Find their sole voice in that victorious brow."

I had wholly forgotten this sonnet. But it expresses
with wonderful force the class of feelings with which I
first saw Mont Blanc's great head unveiled. " Self-
scanned, self-honoured, self-secure,"—that is the im-
pression which the first sight of Mont Blanc thrilled
through me,—and as the mist flew away eastwards, leav-
ing all the white needles of that wonderful ridge bright
and ba^e, till the grand Aiguille Yerte itself towered up,
with just a flush of the western light upon it, above the
Mer de Glace, the impression of the self-reliant majesty
of Mont Blanc among that forest of tapering mountain
spires grew stronger and more vivid. It certainly was a
very exciting vision,-—the more as we had abandoned
hope, and the curtain drew up so suddenly. As we
descended we could not keep our eyes off the wonderful
sight. The white chain seemed to watch us as we entered
the pine woods, kept glancing at us, as the twilight fell,
through every opening, till we felt quite furtive and
haunted by the ghostly heads towering in front of us.
And when the lights glimmered close in the hospitable
inns of Chamounix, and the buzz of the streets fell upon
our ears, we were almost as glad of the rest for our minds
as for our bodies. We had seen

" Power dwell apart in its tranquillity,

Kemote, serene, and inaccessible,"124 the lights and shadows of

till our minds ached for either the stir of varied life, or for
the contemplation of that sort of power which rests the
mind because it offers something on which to lean. There
is nothing of this to me about Mont Blanc. How Shelley,
for the time inverting, as it were, the wonderful sublimity
of Wordsworth's " Ode to Duty," and instead of attri-
buting to conscience the power to " preserve the stars
from wrong," and to make " the most ancient heavens "
for ever "fresh and strong," could say to Mont Blanc,

" Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe,"

seems a puzzle. That might, no doubt, be said of Shake-
speare—of whom Mont Blanc seems in other respects a
sort of image—on account of his wonderful tenderness
and variety of human insight, but it is not this in Shake-
speare, it is only his impenetrable solitude, his self-
sustained grandeur which Mont Blanc brings home so
powerfully to the mind. It is the immutability of power,
not repeal or revolution of any sort, which is imaged by
that white still dome above the clouds :—

4 4 The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! "

We have found Chamounix delightful. The valley,
with all its sublimity, is so sunny, so beautiful, so green,
so homelike. We have done, of course, what every one
does,—gone with the troop of pilgrims to climb the
Montanvert, cross the Mer de Grlace, wonder at the gran-A HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND. 125

deur of the solitary Dent du Geant rising sheer up out
of the great spreading sea of ice, traverse the limestone
cliff above Chapeau, and return by the source of the
Arveiron to Chamounix. That " course " is so evidently de
rigueur that scores of pilgrims paraded before and after
us on the very day we performed our pilgrimage, and I
am bound to say it is well worthy of its popularity.
But what we have, P think, enjoyed most here, though we
were not quite so fortunate in our day, was the excursion
to the Pierre Pointue, a rock the first stage in the ascent
of Mont Blanc, from which you gain a most marvellous
side view of the great glacier of the Bossons. We sat for
half an hour on the rocks at the very edge of the glacier,
gazing at a confusion of domes and pinnacles in ice, all in
grand relief against a dark wall of rock on the other side
of the glacier. There were distant ice domes like St.
Paul's, a ruined fort, a crowd of spires and minarets, and
beneath them all, gaping within a few yards of us, a great,
black, yawning cave, from which one of the many glacier-
feeders of the Arve issued forth,—

'4 There many a precipice
Frost and the sun in scorn of mortal power
Have piled-—dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,

A city of death distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice."

Far above, the great smooth snows of the Dome du Goute
gleamed in the uncertain sun, and beside us we found just
one solitary blossom of the same lovely little gentian
which carpeted so thickly the border of the Lac d'Anterne.
The distant valley far beyond Les Ouches was dyed, by126 A HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.

overhanging clouds, the richest purple. No other scene
had ever given us so perfect a conception of the desolate
grandeur of a glacier. As we returned, Chamounix
seemed specially cheerful and lovely. The low sun was
on the meadows; the cattle were slowly returning
towards their homes; the heaps of flax lay spread
out in the shape of fans to dry upon the fields; the
peasant women were reaping anxiously their late corn;
an old priest was walking meditatively amid the crop,
a folded newspaper in his hand, but looking more
at his wheat than his news;—the whole valley was a
picture of cheery labour and wealth, in strange contrast
to the icy desolation of the scene we had just quitted.

A Working Man in Search of Rest.V.

The Grande Chartreuse.

Gkenoble, October 5, 1868.

/~\UR holiday is all but over, and I shall not trouble you
^ again. We reserved a visit to the Grande Char-
treuse for the end, on the principle on which thrifty
children guard themselves against leaving the dull ele-
ments of their pudding to the last, so as to cast upon the
gratification of the moment the mellow light of anticipa-
tion. Moreover, it was pleasant to keep an interest of a
kind somewhat different from that of the grand Swiss
scenery in view to the very close of our holiday, as it
mingled a new thread of feeling, or if you please, of fancy,
with all we saw even before we visited the wild solitude
into which St. Bruno fled from the world before the death
of the Conqueror. When I was quite a boy the story of
the foundation of the Carthusian Order in the " wilder-
ness/' as it was called, above Grenoble, used to fascinate
me in that amusing old book, Butler's " Lives of the
Saints," where it is duly chronicled how Hugh, Bishop
of Grenoble, dreamt one night in 1084 that he saw God
Himself building a church in the desert of the Chartreuse,
—a wild place in his own diocese,—and seven stars rising128 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

from the ground which went before him to show him the
way to the appointed site ; and thereupon the next day
he received a visit from seven strangers, of whom St.
Bruno was the leader, entreating him to give them some
place in his diocese where they might serve God, " remote
from worldly affairs, and without being burdensome to
men." My old boyish interest in the place was revived
last year by Mr. Matthew Arnold's fine " Stanzas from
the Grande Chartreuse," which seem to me to resemble
a perfect watercolour in the fresh and dewy tints of their
landscape, and to breathe a most musical, if also a some-
what self-conscious and carefully attuned meditative sad-
ness over that stern and brooding ascetic faith which he
could neither heartily enter into nor yet adequately replace.
Accordingly, after quitting Chamounix we made our way by
Geneva to this grandly situated city, and have employed
the last two days,—perhaps, on the whole, the most
rememberable of our holiday,—in a visit to the great Car-
thusian monastery.

Grenoble is evidently not a place much visited by
tourists. The best inns in it, instead of commanding the
grand sweeps of the Drac and the Isere, which unite just
below Grenoble, and the great range of the Cottian Alps
beyond, have not a much finer view than Mr. Pickwick's
lodgings in Goswell Street. The market-place is on the
right hand and the market-place is on the left, and
almost all that you can see is the market-place before you.
The inns are towny and therefore noisy, and what has
made them worse for us is that there are some soldiers
quartered in the place, whose colonel appears to resideA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND. 129

here. There are sentries before the door, and the guard
is changed twice in the night,—not without much mili-
tary rattle. Moreover, the inhabitants of Grenoble prefer
to assemble for nightly gossip before the door of the
hotel,—perhaps by reason of the presence of the sentries,
—and there they converse till about two in the morning,
when they disperse for one hour and a half, and reas-
semble before four for the same purpose. Add fco this
that the gallant colonel occupies himself for at least two
hours in the midst of the night in dashing his boots in
different directions about his room, which is next ours,
and clattering his sword against the furniture, and that
all the bells of the hotel appear to ring into our room and
are alarums which go off (about every half hour during
the night) with immense explosions just at the head of my
bed—(an arrangement which seems to us rather cruel,
as we are not expected to do any of the waiting, and
those who are avoid the horrors of the summons),—and
you will see that the ascetic practices of the Chartreuse
were fortunately broken to us by sharp mortifications at
Grenoble.

I confess I was a little shocked to find that we could
go by omnibus to the very gates of the ascetic solitaries.
Eight hundred years ago Hugh, Bishop of Grenoble,
represented seriously to St. Bruno, according to Butler,
" the dismal situation of that solitude, beset with very
high craggy rocks, almost all the year covered with snow
and thick fogs, which rendered them not habitable." This
situation, however, continues the biographer, " did not
daunt the servants of God ; on the contrary, joy painted

KTHE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS Of

on their faces expressed their satisfaction in haying found
so convenient a retirement cut off from the society of
men." But surely it would have daunted the austere
recluse to have been threatened with an omnibus from
Grenoble full of visitors every day at noon during the
season, returning at 3 p.m to the city. Or what, indeed,
would his opinion have been of the very excellent liqueur
manufactory by which the brethren earn their bread, as
well as the means for their large and generous charities.
Though solitude and austerities are still, as ever, their
profession, the world regularly supplies them with a
stream of awe-struck admirers, while they supply the
world with a very agreeable and wholesome liqueur at
moderate prices. Thus have eight centuries enabled " the
world " to gain ground on even its most bitter and syste-
matic foes, smoothing the way for it into the wilderness,
and even teaching these haters of the world themselves to
consult in the inmost recesses of their refuge its tastes
and appetites. Some remark to this effect I dropped,
not entirely to the satisfaction of a Munich priest of
extremely reactionary politics and thoroughly Ultramon-
tane theology, who was with us as we journeyed up to
the Chartreuse, in company with a Bavarian student who
was evidently intended for a priest, but seemed to me to
be in a rather recalcitrant attitude of mind. The priest
only grunted an assent to my remark on the horror with
which St. Bruno would have regarded our conveyance.
Perhaps he thought such reflections would not be of an
edifying tendency to the mind of his gloomy young com-
panion. I conjecture that the latter was being carriedA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.

about by his sacerdotal tutor to all the places best calcu-
lated to overpower the youth's objection to what seemed
to be his intended calling. He had been taken to Corps,
about thirty miles from Grenoble in the opposite direction
to the Carthusian convent, to see " Our Lady of La
Salette," just before his visit to the Chartreuse, and the
priest assured me that all the miracles reported of that
locality were perfectly genuine, and that miraculous cures
still take place there every week. But in spite of all
this, the youth looked sulky and obdurate; nor do I think
that he had a companion well fitted to subdue his mind
into the attitude of spiritual humility or wonder. Cer-
tainly, if I may judge by the hard laugh with which the
old gentleman accompanied his hope that Prussia and
France might fall to blows while South Germany had
"the pleasure,"—such was his Christian expression,—of
looking on, and the business-like tone in which he assured
me that the Church at large was already disposed to
accept the dogma of the infallibility of the Pope, and that
if the Council of December, 1869, should declare it, he
should thenceforth believe it without hesitation, he seemed
to me about the last man in the world who could have
helped to steep any youthful imagination in that sense of
awe and mystery which would best predispose it to the
renunciation of earthly hopes. The little omnibus into
which we changed at St. Laurent le Pont took us up
through one of the wildest of ravines to the monastery, by
a road that was, on a very small scale, almost as fine a
little piece of engineering as bits of the St. Gothardor the
Stelvio. It wound above the bed of " the Dead Guyers,"132 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

which was roaring away, sometimes beside us, sometimes
at an immense depth beneath us, then flowed through
narrow clefts,—gates in the rock,—which towered above
us a sheer perpendicular height of many hundred feet on
both sides, as straight as if they were hewn gate-posts, and
then, again, tunnelled through the rock for scores of yards
together. The thick black pine forests that covered both
sides of the ravine for the whole distance from St. Laurent
le Pont to the monastery,—a drive of about an hour and
a half,—no doubt protect the road in a great measure
from avalanches in winter, and render its repairs less ex-
pensive, besides adding greatly to the solemnity and
wildness of the situation.

At last, about a stone's throw below the gates of the
monastery,—even in the nineteenth century an omnibus
may not venture to draw up absolutely to its door,—we
were told to alight, and after climbing a hundred yards
more, the ravine opens out into a soft green plateau, shut
in on two sides by steep overhanging rocks, while the
thick forest lines the gradual slope of the mountain in
front. Here, in that cold but stately palace to the right,
where long stretches of white wall tell of corridors many
hundreds of feet long, and a number of slim white towers
springing from pointed Grothic roofs mark out against the
dark background of pine forest the belfry, the chapel, the
refectory, the prior's cell, and the other official localities
of the monastery, dwells the General of the Carthusian
Order, with some thirty brothers, and also about ten or
twelve priests who are not monks. Opposite this stately
enclosure, on the left of the green plateau, is a little whiteA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND. 133

house with a tall white chimney, where dwell a few
kindly women, in the dress of sisters of charity, who
entertain the womankind among the visitors ; for though
the most enthusiastic and devout of the pilgrims to the
Chartreuse are women, no woman is allowed ever to
enter its gates. They may only look upon it, like Moses
on the Promised Land, from the Pisgah of the adjacent
mountain-side. The good women in this asylum for lady
pilgrims are themselves only winked at by the Superior of
the Order because they facilitate visits which are no doubt
in every way profitable, both by bringing donations to
the Order and by bringing customers for the liqueurs.
They are tolerated only on condition of keeping out
of sight as much as possible; and, also, it is evidently
required of them to profess complete ignorance of the
arrangements of the monastery. To all the questions
my wife asked, their stereotyped answer was, "Je ne
sais pas, Madame/' though on many points even I, who
was only one night within the walls of the monastery,
was able to satisfy her. The good women, being there at
all only on sufferance, were no doubt taught that it was
good taste to seem to be cut off from the monastery by as
great a gulf as if they had lived miles away. I had to
leave my wife in this little women's outbuilding, and to
solicit hospitality for myself within the walls of the Char-
treuse. And very hospitable the monks are of their
hermit's fare. No flesh or fowl ever enters their walls,
and the fish,—apparently a flabby carp is the only kind
they habitually receive,—was to my mind worse than
none. But bread, omelettes, potatoes, cheese they give134 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

you in plenty, and very good of their kind, with a thin
vin ordinaire, which it seems to be expected that you
will dilute plentifully with water. At least, as I was the
only heretic there, and I saw that the dozen or so Catholic
Frenchmen all diluted their wine plentifully with water,
I followed the example, though I found the water redun-
dant. We were not even allowed coffee or tea, though I
found that this rule was relaxed for the ladies at the out-
building. At the same time the brethren allowed us a
glass each of their admirable and very wholesome liqueur,
partly perhaps from an innocent pride in it, and partly
from a wise commercial prudence. I found my wife
suffering more from the scanty fare than I had done.
She could not manage the omelettes, and the good sisters
had asked in dismay what, then, Englishwomen did con-
sume, to which a voluble French lady replied for her,
with a mixture of envy and scorn,—" Ros-bif, bif-stak,
cotelettes, portere,"— a catalogue of dainties over which
the sisters opened their eyes wide, and sighed with a cer-
tain air of yearning in which scorn was not mingled,
I was much struck with the white and bloodless faces of
the two or three Carthusian brothers whom I saw. One of
them, if not the Superior certainly high in office, came in to
say a word of courtesy to the strangers after their dinner,
and there was a sweetness and refinement in his voice as
he hoped that the Chartreuse had not been inhospitable
to us, which was in striking contrast to the harsh and
uncultivated voices to which I listened at midnight in the
chapel, chaunting the litanies and hymns.

We wandered late in the afternoon through the woodsA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND. 135

and meadows above the monastery. The turf was dyed
a rich lilac by the lovely autumn crocus, which grew
luxuriantly all round. The evening sun fell on cream-
coloured oxen, with black patches on their shoulders and
a bright crimson fringe hanging low over their meek
pleading eyes, to keep off the flies, as they dragged heavy
loads of pine trunks out of the forest; while a lay brother
(I suppose) in the usual white woollen dress of the order,
his white cowl hanging back over his shoulders, and a
heavy pastoral-looking staff in his hand, accompanied the
woodmen with their wains, superintending the operations
as he stood at the oxen's head. I could not help thinking,
as I watched the party urging and spurring the oxen,
and signing them this way and that, as the poor creatures
struggled with their load up the steep, uneven bank, and
sometimes remonstrated with an inarticulate groan against
the arduous duties imposed on them, that for us to
decipher the real mind within those white-cowled brethren,
or for them to decipher the real mind at work within the
bosom of their guests, was far more difficult, if not impos-
sible, than to interpret the thoughts of the meek, struggling
oxen before us. What were the real motives of these
thirty or forty ascetics ? Had they really hated the
world ? Did they find peace in their austere solitude ?
Did they love the silence, and the monotony, and the
midnight matins, and the long dark cloisters, and the
bare cells, and the bleak courts, with the cold plashing
fountains. Did the motto I saw on one of these solitary little
homes, " 0 solitudo, vera beatitudo ! " represent the true
feeling of most of them, or only what they hoped to find136 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

when they entered it ? Had they ever felt the enthu-
siasm of solitary joy ? And did the feeling last, or was
that long line of cells, for the most part, a line of prisons
that had closed on every hope ? I had far less means of
even guessing the answer to such questions as these, than
of forming some probable judgment of the thoughts of
the poor oxen that never had spoken and never could
speak to tell them. The world that was accessible but
closed, was far, far more beyond my reach than the world
that was absolutely inaccessible except to conjecture.
Surely human life is the mystery of mysteries.

I was asked if I would like to attend the matins, which
began at a quarter to eleven at night, and lasted, I
believe, till after three a.m. I said that if my Protes-
tantism were not an objection I should; but I found that
I was considered comparatively blameless for heresy,
being only an Englishman, and that I might attend if I
pleased. Accordingly, after nearly two hours' rest on
my straw bed, I dressed and entered the dark gallery of
the chapel. Guest after guest followed me, till it had
about a dozen occupants, my friend the Munich priest
alone bringing a candle with him, that he might join in
the offices. The chapel below was very dimly lighted,
with just one or two wax candles. When the bell tolled
the white-robed monks entered, each bearing his own
taper with him, which he put down low in his seat, so as
to light the book from which he read when he needed it.
At other times these tapers (as if they were in a dark
lanthorn) seemed completely extinguished. Reading by
a priest, and very harsh, guttural chanting (withoutA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.

music), alternated for the whole time I stayed. The pro-
nunciation of the Latin was so different from that to
which I am accustomed, and the singsong of the ihtoning
was so difficult to follow, that I scarcely distinguished a
single sentence in two hours and a half, and all the
strangers but one—Catholics though they were,—had
dropped off again to bed before I left. But to me there
was a curious fascination in trying to conceive the mo-
tives and inner life of that strange company, as I listened
to their rude, discordant voices, saw here and there the
gleam of their white cowls as they bent over their boobs*
and remembered that these long midnight services consti-
tute the chief social diversions of their lonely life. They
never meet, I believe, in the week time, except at vespers
and matins, — mass being reserved for Sundays and
festivals. No one enters their private cells, so that the
social feelings, so far as they have any, must be chiefly
kept alive by the short afternoon and long midnight
services. And I am bound to say they sang and re-
sponded as if the crash of their rugged voices were a
relief to their loneliness. As the moon struggled through
the dark windows on to that strange scene, which goes on
day after day, and year after year, and century aftqr cen-
tury, with so little of what we should call human interest,
I could not help lamenting how little light I had gained
as to the inner life of the convent. I stole back to my cell
down the ghostly cloister, and listened to the fountain in
the great court beneath my window, with a mind as
unsatisfied as ever, and yet not without recognising the
dreamy charm of such a solitude. The chanting had not138 THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF

ceased, and I could still hear the rough voices drone out
now and then; the crucifix at the foot of the bed glimmered
peacefully in the moonlight; and I fell asleep wondering
whether the holy Bruno, whose unintellectual but powerful
face, as painted in its last grim agony, I had seen in one
of the great rooms of the monastery, had really led the
majority of his followers to the peace for which he sighed.
His motto was, " Anticipaverunt vigilias oculi mei; tur-
batus sum et non sum locutus ; cogitavi dies antiquas, et
annos aeternos in mente habui. Ecce elongavi fugiens, et
mansi in solitudine." " Mine eyes prevented the night-
watches. I was troubled and I did not speak. I thought
on the days of old and kept in mind the eternal years.
Behold, I fled away far, and dwelt in solitude." And
with what result ? His biographers say that to him
at least it was serenity and even gaiety of soul. As to
less single spirits, who shall say P But this at least these
strange monuments of solitary religious passion has
effected: they have buoyed out for a careless world the
course of an inward life of faith and love as intense and
absorbing as it is usually invisible. As we wound our way
bftck the next day on mules over the mountains and those

" Alpine meadows soft suffused
With rain, where thick the crocus blows,"

we said to ourselves that even in the midst of London
turmoil, and when bathed deep in " daily labour's dull
Lethean spring/' it would be impossible again to ignore
the depths from which such life as the Carthusians'—be
it sweet or bitter—is fed. We shall often go back in
imagination from the fever of London life toA HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND. 139

" The silent courts, where night and day
Into their stone-carved basin cold
The splashing icy fountains play; "

and where

" Ghostlike in the deepening night
Cowled forms brush by in gleaming white,"

and not, at least, be again tempted by a flippant philoso-
phy or a fever of care, to doubt the fathomless depth of
that spiritual life which asks nothing more for itself than
prayer and solitude, and, at the end, one of those massive
stone crosses, engraved only with initials, to mark in the
fair and blooming graveyard—the only spot that I saw
brightened by colour within the walls,—the place where
the worn-out frame of the brother finds rest at last.

A Working Man in Search of Rest.A HOLIDAY IN THE TYEOL.I.

To Ammergau.

Berne, August 4, 1870.

QIR,—While the war gives to all English journals, and
^ to yours even more than to most others, a monotone
of somewhat grim earnestness and intensity, it may be a
relief to you and some of your readers, if you allow me to
give you a slight account of a holiday in the Bavarian and
Austrian Tyrol and Switzerland, the latter part of which
has been troubled by wars and rumours of wars and a
certain amount of anxiety as to our own communications
with home. To tell the truth, like a good many other
English, we are lingering at Berne in a somewhat feverish
state of mind. My husband consults all sorts of strangers,
in languages of which he is and' is not master, as to the
prospect of difficulties on the route home, and they all
answer with an air of studied resolve against timidity,
—referring him to authorities like Swiss landlords and
English agents for tourist tickets, who are hardly without
bias on such a matter—that to me, at least, is not en-
couraging. I have no mission which demands for me
that rather profane " baptism of fire " of which I observe
Louis, the heir apparent, has had a somewhat homceo-144	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

pathic dose. Englishmen arriving from Paris to-day
assure me that they met at Dole on their way towards the
Swiss border at Pontarlier a large body of the Emperor's
Algerine troops, looking very dark and fierce and
diabolic indeed. I have no fancy for meeting them, or,
perhaps, returning with another body of them who have
tasted blood, and may be sent back by the Emperor to
keep Paris quiet, if he finds Prussia too strong for him.
So, on the whole, I tell Edward, who is, I am happy to
say, a good deal guided by my advice, " My dear, we are
safe and comfortable at Berne, in the capital of a neutral
State which loves foreigners,—and in a German portion of
it, moreover, which France won't be likely to annex at
all, and Prussia not at present. We have a grand view,
first-rate accommodation, good shops, plenty of society,
the earliest news of all that goes on,—little Louis's
baptism of fire was known here as soon as at Paris,—the
quietest gate into France when we dare try it, and the
safest of all back-doors into Italy, if we dare not. Let us
wait here and keep our eyes open. You shall study the
newspapers and question strangers. I will write some
brief recollections of what we have seen and send copies
home, that there may be a double chance of preserving
what I ' would not willingly let die.'" And Edward
consented, as he usually does, to what is proposed by me.
To some extent I think he was bribed by the prospect of
seeing this great old toy clock of Berne strike twelve to
his heart's content, For even in these sad times, when
Europe is in flames, and we hardly know whether we
shall ever again gain our home in peace, my husband'sA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	145

boyishness of nature asserts itself so strongly that he will
run away from the perusal of the Emperor's latest car-
magnole and Count Bismarck's freshest confession of his
arts as a tempter, to see the little man above the great
Berne clock waggle his feet as the hand touches the mark,
the procession of bears go solemnly round, the figure of
Time shake his scythe, and the little cock at the side
crow his satisfaction at the expiration of another hour
spent by Europe in all sorts of refined preparation for
human misery. It was really very curious to-day, when
one knew what each hour was probably doing on the
Rhine, to see the English and American, and even
German tourists, steadily watching with signs of anxious
and almost nervous expectation, the operations of the
grotesque mechanical toy on which the simple inhabitants
of Berne have so long prided themselves. I am not sure
that it does not give more solid satisfaction to some of us
than the vision of the Alps as we see them from our
windows here, suddenly unveiling their white forms in
the setting sun like so many giants taking off the cloak of
darkness, and then again shrouding themselves in it, and
again throwing it off as if by caprice, though really as the
laws of cloud and vapour, light and shade decide. After
all, it is very pleasant that men should be able to remain
children even in the midst of war and terror. The Alps
are little relief to a mind strained by the story of human
crime and enterprise. The great toy-clock is, and there
was something very touching about the pleased smile
which passed like a ray of sunshine over so many wonder-
ing children,—grown up, and otherwise,—as the doll-

L

!146	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

population of the Berne clock woke into action and went
through its momentary routine. I heard a German
tourist who had been steadily sceptical to the last moment,
heave a great sigh of relief, and look as if a burden were
lifted from his soul.

But to begin my story, if your earnest pages are not
too full of grimmer matter to accept my slight sketches.
We left home, Edward and I, on the 25th of June, when
war seemed about as likely as earthquake, pestilence, or
famine on a great scale, and our only fears for our dis-
comfiture were connected with the uncertainties of the
weather. We had long promised ourselves to see the
Ammergau Passion-Play in 1870, and fortunately enough
made it our first instead of our last object,—for if we had
not, we should, as we now know, have found the green
mountain-side again bare of its great theatre, and many
of the actors, including, as I hear, poor Joseph Mair, who
gave us so wonderful a vision of the Saviour of mankind,
girding themselves with that sword by which Mair warned
us in so solemn a voice that they who take it are wont to
perish. Nay, if it be true, as we see in the papers, that
Saarbriick was garrisoned by " only seven thousand
Bavarians" on the day when little Louis received his
baptism of fire, it may well be that the actor who gave us
moments of mixed delight and pain and wonder and awe,
such as I never thought to feel in the theatre of any
earthly land, has already passed through a severer baptism
of fire than the melodramatic one reserved for little Louis,
and discovered behind the veil the difference between even
his own fine dream of the Passion and the Passion whichA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	147

was no dream. You have yourself strikingly observed
how strange an irony there seems in this violent break-up
of the sacred play at Ammergau, through the passions of
Emperors and Kings, who rudely bid the actors of the
great tragedy take swords of this world into their hands,
and banish to a more convenient season their visions of
the faith that is not of this world. If you had heard
Mair say, with that deep spiritual gaze and that wide
calm forehead which gave so strange an impression of a
soul living in permanent " detachment" from earthly
interests, " Hereafter I will not talk much with you, for
the Prince of this world cometh and hath nothing in me,"
you would have felt the irony of the event even more
keenly than you did.

Well, I will not attempt to enter in this letter on the
play itself, for I should like to keep that for a separate
one, so I will only just say a word of our journey to
Ammergau, and release you for the present. We came
from Paris by way of Yesoul, Belfort, Mulhouse, and
Basle, all places except the last, now likely, it is said, to
be trodden by an invading army, if the Prussians should
be victorious. We had no more anticipation than anybody
else of the advancing shadow, but I shall never forget the
utter dreariness in which the East of France seemed to
be lying on that scorching day. The pastures were all
burnt brown. Mighty clouds of dust travelled with the
train. When the usual "hat-meals"—as they funnily
call the hot meals so ingeniously provided in baskets—
were thrust into the carriages at Yesoul, there was little
appetite to consume them. A burning thirst consumed143	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

the travellers, who rushed to a flowing spring at one of the
smaller stations, and thrust their heads and hands under
the refreshing stream. France, as we noticed at the
time, had never looked to us so dreary, and never were
two mortals gladder to enter on the land of bubbling
waters and mighty rapids and everlasting ice than we
when we greeted the Rhine as it rushes in all its grandeur
by the " Three Kings " at Basle, just fresh from its mighty
leaps at Laufenburg and Schaff hausen, and not much above
a hundred miles from the picturesque spot where the two
brawling mountain torrents, called the Yorder and Hinter
Rhein, even after uniting their forces, hardly succeed, at
least in summer-time, in establishing any title to be
called a river. Even Basle we hardly enjoyed. The
Minster was beautiful, but the grand old cloisters were
" undergoing repair." The horse-chestnut terrace behind
it looked cool and peaceful enough, as we watched the
Rhine take its last great sweep in the land of its birth,
and then hurry along to the countries where it is made a
geographical plea for war that nations are not divided by
it as they ought to be. It was market-day, and the Swiss
peasants brought their dinners up to the terrace of horse-
chestnuts to eat, and sat pleasantly chatting and admiring
the Rhine racing a hundred feet below them, as they sliced
their strong cheese and arranged their baskets for their
journey back. It was pleasant, too, being ferried over
above the bridge, and sitting on the bridge as we returned
to watch the girls going home after their shoppings,
sometimes with the quaint black Baden horns on their
head, sometimes in Swiss costume, oftenest of all in theA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	149

neat cosmopolitan dress of the French grisette. But we
were very glad to get away from Basle, and to see the
Rhine dwindling to a mighty rapid, as we skirted it all
the way to Schaffhausen, and finally saw it flow out of
the Boden-See at Constance. The lake itself was dim and
cold, and the steamer voyage upon it, never one of the
pleasantest of Continental experiences, unusually dreary,
as American and Scotch tourists read aloud from their
guides in a magniloquent way the account of the number
of distinct countries around its shores, or eagerly debated
the proper price of Paisley shawls, and the quickest mode
of " doing " the country between Lindau and Dresden.
Then there were the usual smoke and smells, the usual
minute vibration of lake steamers,—a tick-tack from the
stomach to the brain,—and the usual necessity for eating
to avoid sinking of the stomach, though producing a
sinking of the heart;—and you can never get anything
but Kalbs-cotelettes upon a Constance steamer,— in other
words, fleshy baby, done richly with bread crumbs. Yet
there was a grand gleam of the snowy Sentis through the
mists as we passed the heights of Appenzell, which the
Scotch and Yankee disputants about the price of Paisley
shawls almost noticed, for I heard one of them say
casually, " That's a fine bank /" We were glad to empty
out almost all our "bloated tourists" at Lindau, and
enter on the quiet country at Bregenz, where we got our
first grand view of the Boden-See. Going in search of
the Gebhardsberg, which no one would have missed but
ourselves, we got high into the hills between the Yorarl-
berg and the Bregenzerwald, and saw the grandest ofA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

sunsets over the most lovely of scenes. The sky was
barred with orange and golden and violet streaks, which
painted the richest colours on the lake below; the Alps
of Appenzell stood out in the yellow sunset, while the
Bavarian mountains and the great range of the Arlberg
to the north and south-east stretched away in purple
shadow. The lake itself from Rheineck and Lindau in
the foreground, to Constance in the far distance, was a
miracle of ideal colour,—touching more and richer lands
of dream than Badeker or Murray ever reckoned that it
touches lands of earth. We seemed to have reached the
land of promise which travellers always dream of, and so
seldom find. And with delight we anticipated the next
day, when we were to plunge into these purple hills in
the pleasantest of all conveyances for earthly beings
travelling in pairs,—an Einspanner, a one-horse easy
carriage, driven, in our case, by the stolidest young
driver, I think, whom the travail of generations ever pro-
duced. He gave to every beggar who asked of him, but
without a trace of sympathy, and all the three days he
drove us I never saw him voluntarily open his mouth, or,
except once, change his expression. That was when a
great beam of wood lay across the road, whereupon he
stopped, descended, heaved it into the lake, and smiled
grimly. Edward asked him if he would not stay over the
Sunday at Ammergau and see the performance, but he
replied curtly that if he did he should lose two days, and
be " eating up 99 all he had earned by the job. " Deutscher
Ernst" certainly never assumed a more wooden apathy,
yet there was nothing ill-tempered about the youth. HeA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	151

seemed to me a new species produced by the hard con-
ditions of the struggle for existence in Austria,—a Stoic
labourer who had survived laughter and tears. And his
horse was like him. All day, and every one of these
three days, that indefatigable creature climbed and de-
scended almost perpendicular mountain-sides as if it went
by machinery and were incapable of exhaustion. For
three days of more or less hearty enjoyment—modified,
no doubt, by Kalbs-cotelettes, and smells, and dirty table-
linen now and then—we drove through these purple
mountains, now skirting green tarns, now winding along
lovely lakes like the Plan-See, now driving for hours
together through a pine forest, till on Friday, the 1st
July, we reached the " friendly little room " at Ammergau
which Herr Lehrer Gutsjell had prepared for our recep-
tion, and sat down to ask ourselves if we were not, after
all, a little afraid of the pleasure which we had come so
far to enjoy.—I am, Sir, &c.,

An Englishwoman in Difficulties.II.

The Passion Play.

Berne, Friday, August 12, 1870.

CIR,—"Violent disturbances in Paris!" "An English-
^ man shot by order of the Government as a Prussian
spy !" Imagine my consternation. Why, Edward is pre-
cisely the sort of person to get shot as a Prussian spy.
I don't mean that he looks like a spy ; but he has a large
beard, and is horribly shortsighted and looks like a book-
worm, and has German books in his bag, and he unfortu-
nately has a habit, got from our many weeks of travel in
Germany, of saying " herein" instead of " come in"
when anybody knocks at the door,—a habit by which
a German waiter in a French inn has more than once
found out that German is the right language to talk to
him in; and then he is very imprudent in his talk, and
is just as certain to revile the Emperor in France as in
Switzerland. Nobody, I am sure, would ever suspect me
of being Prussian ; and as I can't get on in German at
all fluently, the French, if they would reason, might be
pretty sure my husband is not German; but they are
quite frlntic just now, and for anything I see, Edward hasA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

153

every bit as good a chance of being shot on suspicion as
poor Mr. Elliot.* I am afraid our stay at Berne begins
to look somewhat indefinite, for I tell Edward I really
cannot allow ourselves to furnish occasion for a " Corre-
spondence between the English and French Governments
on the arrest and execution of Mr. and Mrs. —-—, English
subjects." He says it would be a very distinguished close
to our career; but of that I am not ambitious, and I
cannot forget the large circle of attached friends who
would deplore our loss and give Lord Granville good
reason to deplore it too, — even without making any
allowance for his naturally kind heart. Well, as I tell
Edward, there is the back-door through Italy always open,
and I suppose we could get home by way of Malta and
Gibraltar at no greater sacrifice than a long sea-voyage.
For the present, however, Berne is very pleasant and
safe, and I have the consolation of seeing English tourists
still voluntarily coming by dribblets into the Swiss trap in
which we are nibbling our Alpine cheese with so anxious
a heart as to the ultimate " way out." But to return to
my Ammergau narrative.

We had felt more anxious, as I told you in my last
letter, as to the effect of the Passion Play on us, the
nearer we were to the fulfilment of the long-delayed
expectation. Like most other English people who went
there, I had read the account of the play in " Quits " by
the Baroness Tautphoeus, at the time when Flunger, who
now acts the part of Pilate, took that of Christ, and her

* We may reassure our fair correspondent Mr. Elliot's death
was a pure canard.—[Ed. Spectator.]i54	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

account made me fear the play might be almost too
oppressively real, too much of an illusion. On the other
hand, on the Saturday, Edward had been shown Joseph
Mair, who now takes the part of Christ, sitting in a wide-
awake and short jacket with some friends outside one of
the Ammergau inns, drinking a glass of beer, and had
thought his face, as seen under these not very fortunate
circumstances, though gentle and, for his position in life,
singularly refined, quite wanting in the majesty requisite
to present springs of action so unique and unearthly,—
and apparently, too, a little shadowed by a personal
melancholy, or perhaps it might be by a craving for
work more suitable to his powers than the wood-carving
which is his usual occupation. How if the whole repre-
sentation were marred by a touch of anything morbid
and self-regarding in the expression of one who in every
word and deed should have seemed to be founding a
kingdom that is not of this world ? But neither fear was
in the least realised. The open-air theatre, with the
very un-Oriental scenery,—the bright green mountain-
side, with its herds of cows, its hayfields and pine woods,
towering behind the stage and its mimic Jerusalem,—
the larks that hung over the audience vying with the
finest of the singers in the beauty of their song,—the
bright butterflies that darted to and fro among us when-
ever a gleam of sun came out,—all gave an outside frame-
work, as it were, to the play which kept our imaginations
fully awake to the fact that it was but a reproduction of
the Passion in a distant land and time, and guarded us
against falling under the spell of what I might call anA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	155

unreal realism. Moreover, the long-robed and gaily-robed
Schutzgeister, "protecting spirits/' as the people there
called them, who played the part of a Greek chorus,
reciting, chanting, and singing their comments on the
development of the action, and their descriptions of those
various illustrative tableaux-vivants from the earlier
periods of Jewish history, by which the leading events
of our Lord's life were, or were supposed to be, pre-
figured, interposed a confessed artistic purpose between
the spectator and the action, and protected us from any
illusion that we were gazing at the greatest, darkest,
brightest action of human history, and not merely at a dim
image of it. There is not only no vulgar attempt at that
"deception" which is falsely called realism, and is, in
fact, the most utter unrealism ; but there is a much com-
pleter freedom from it than is at all usual in the modern
drama;—a freedom partly due to the pure air and natural
lights and shadows of the wide mountain landscape,
which counteract every morbid or artificial excitement,
partly to the greatness of the action itself, which, like
the themes of the old Greek tragedies, kept before our
eyes sufferings and aims elevated far beyond those of
ordinary life. Hence, though I felt, with the heroine in
"Quits," from the moment that the procession with
Christ sitting on the ass wound on to the stage, that
every interest centred at once in that strangely im-
pressive figure, from which it was impossible to remove
the eyes while it remained before them, yet there was
not a trace of that harassing and absorbing pain which
would have accompanied any illusion, any forgetfulness156	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

that what we saw was not an image of the past, but a
tragedy maturing in our presence. On the other hand,
Edward's fear that there would hardly be enough majesty
in the figure, or sufficient elevation above personal morti-
fications to express the supernatural range of motive
essential to the whole, disappeared in a moment. The
singular grace of the purple robe did something; but
Herr Mair's complete possession of the radical idea
of our Lord's life, — an interior life lived with the
Father which drew none of its deeper springs from mere
earthly circumstance,—gave to a dark face, and tender,
speaking eyes, which certainly had enough capacity for
expressing under other influences a morbid dejection, a
grandeur of mien, and a complete " detachment" from all
earthly passion which I have never seen,—at least in
combination with so much human tenderness,—in any of
the painters' ideal Christs. If there were any defect
in the representation, it was perhaps that the far-away
light in the eyes so entirely predominated in vividness that
one missed the flash when it struck either on evil or on
good. When, after sliding with inexpressible grace from
the ass on which he rode, and entering the outer Court of
the Temple, he finds it full of the tables of the money-
changers and of those who sell doves, there is perhaps
too much of mild serenity in the tone of the severe judg-
ment, "It is written, my Father's house is a house of
prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves." When
he asks Judas, " Judas, betrayest thou the Son of Man
with a kiss ? " there is not that lightening of the eye for
which one looks. And when> bending under the cross, heA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	157

cries, " Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but
weep for yourselves and for your children. If this is
done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry ? "
there is hardly that piercing vision of the appalling future
in his glance which seems to be demanded by its wholly
obliterating for the moment so terrible a present. But
this, I think, is almost the only criticism which the most
fastidious observer could have passed. For true and
perfectly natural stateliness of movement and dignity of
manner, both in private with the Apostles, and amidst
every indignity of the trial, it is impossible to conceive
Herr Mair's part surpassed. "Ye call me Master and
Lord, and ye say well, for so I am," is pronounced in a
tone which explains how impossible it was that any act
of humility, like the washing of the disciples' feet, should
in Him involve a humiliation. The almost utter silence,
too, before Annas, Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate, and the
complete passiveness in the hands of the soldiers, as they
struck and insulted Him, were all accompanied by a look,
not of fortitude and tension, but rather of what the
Roman Catholics call "recollection," a look as if there
were nothing in these coarse questions and insults to
which any genuine answer or explanation or expostula-
tion were appropriate, but rather only a current of in-
evitable passions, a surface current of which the moving
spring lay deep beyond the reach of words; as if, in
short, there were no real want which words could reach,
only, at most, an opportunity for words which could not
but be vain. Nothing struck me more freshly than the
effect of this prolonged and hardly-broken silence of158	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

Christ's. In reading the history, one cannot realise this,
both because the events pass far too quickly in the terse
narrative, and because such silence, till you see it, is a
negative and not a positive conception. I confess I never
realised so fully the meaning of " the Word made flesh "
as when I perceived the connection between the Divine
speech and silence.

The crucifixion thrilled, but did not horrify me. The
scene opens after the crosses of the crucified malefactors
have been already raised on each side. And as the
greater cross in the middle, on which Christ is stretched,
is slowly elevated into its place, and Mair's head turns
painfully round, his eyes resting upon the soldiers imme-
diately beneath him, who are throwing their dice for his
unseamed garment, and then on the group of women and
disciples standing afar off, a slight shudder ran through
the audience, and in all parts of the theatre there were
men and women alike unable to restrain their tears ; but
even then there was no physical horror, the scene was
too familiar in the history of Christian art. The living
forms of the soldiers and the priests as they pass and
repass the dying figure, the weeping Magdalen with her
yellow robe and her long hair wound round the foot of
the cross, the voice which pardons the penitent male-
factor, asks forgiveness for the mockers, and commends
the mother to the beloved disciple, though they vivify
the great cbnceptions of Albert Diirer or Yelasquez, and
do something towards bridging the waste of centuries, do
not in the least impose on the spectator. The whole
medium of triumphant associations through which youA HOLIDAY IN 2HE TYROL.	159

gaze and listen is too strong for that. You are not con-
niving at a murder; you are commemorating a sacrifice.
It is a pity that the play does not end here, or that if
any scenes are given after the resurrection, they should
not be the walk to Emmaus and the appearance to St.
Thomas, which have in them so much of human pathos.
The scenes of resurrection and ascension, with their some-
what clumsily-arranged machinery of miracle, a little mar
the wonderful unity of the previous effect.

Of the disciples, Peter, John, and Judas were given with
real power by Jakob Hett, Johann Zwink, and Gregor
Lechner, of whom the second looked rather " the disciple
whom Jesus loved " than the Son of Thunder (Boanerges);
while the last, though he made perhaps a little too much
of the greed and avarice of Judas, expressed his despair at
the issue of his sin in an attitude of agony that I can
never forget,—his hand pressed on his forehead with a
force which brought his elbow above the level of his head,
and his upturned face gleaming white with horror. The
curious thing was that all these men were genuine
peasants in their speech and demeanour,—not clowns or
rude-mannered, but "unlearned and ignorant men,"—
while not a vestige of this origin hung about their com-
rades who took the parts of Christ, Pilate, and Herod.
Indeed, the art shown by Herr Flunger and Herr Lang,
who took respectively the parts of Pilate and Herod, was
marvellous. The former is the same actor who twenty
years ago delighted the Baroness Tautphoeus so much by
his representation of Christ. In 1860 he took the part
which he acted again this year, of Pilate. It is hard toibo	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

conceive two characters so different. But for Madame
Tautphoeus's evidence, it would be impossible to imagine
that the face winch expressed so powerfully the Roman
noble's proud indifference to the superstitions of the Jews,
his haughty contempt and dislike for the high priests, his
supercilious wonder at Christ's mysticism and impractica-
bility, however modified by a clear recognition of the
singular loftiness of character beneath, his sagacious
deference to popular wishes, and none the less his funda-
mental scorn for the mob he was so anxious to conciliate,
could have expressed twenty years ago the wonderful
spiritual beauty and " detachment " from earthly motives
of the Saviour of mankind. One would have called his
face a cold though by no means cruel one. Certainly,
with Herr Lang, who took the part of Herod, any such
change of parts must have been always quite impossible.
His was a part of selfish and sensual good-nature and
luxurious vanity. He welcomes Christ as the Czar or
Napoleon might have welcomed Mr. Home, from the
appetite for physical marvel, and suggests to him one
miracle after another which he would like to see per-
formed, treating Christ's unbroken silence as indicating
an imposture which is irritating because it has wasted
time which he might have spent in amusement, and
because it has made him look foolish, but which it
would be ridiculous to treat as justifying death. He sends
Jesus away with a shrug of the shoulder,—"John the
Baptist at least could make kings tremble; this man is a
dumb dog, not to be compared to him for a moment."
The contrast between the puppet-king living for pleasureA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	161

and ostentation, and the working Roman governor could
hardly have been more powerfully given.

But the most unexpected of the impressions which the
play made upon me was that produced by the vivid
popular life thrown into it. You saw this as well in the
most purely pictorial as in the most exciting and clamorous
scenes. The tableaux-vivants from the Old Testament,
really picturesque and brilliant, often contained many
more than a hundred figures, and amongst them consider-
able numbers of children in attitudes which were never
for a moment varied during the three or four minutes that
they were presented to the spectators. At least, I only
once saw a mere baby's arm tremble, and the fiery sword,
which the angel pointed at Adam and Eve when driven
out of Paradise, waver, I think,, a moment in its bearer's
hand; and Edward, who saw the whole play again when
it was repeated on the Monday (I seeing only a part),
reported that Tobit's little dog, a wiry terrier of rather a
large breed, which I had supposed to be stuffed, wagged
its tail and ran off as the curtain descended before it was
quite hidden from view. But, for the most part, the
artistic perfection of very difficult and elaborate tableaux,
including great numbers of figures of all ages, and for the
preparation of which often three or four minutes must
have been the longest available time, was really marvel-
lous. Moreover we heard, and our own experience partly
confirmed it, that the grouping is varied in almost every
performance, being left in great measure to the artistic
instinct and training of the performers. Such a tableau
as that of the people of Israel massed together in the

M162	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

wilderness, where every man, woman, and child looks up
with awe and joy as the shower of manna descends from
heaven,—a tableau connected with the gift of the living
bread in the Last Supper,—could only have been arranged
as it is by a people whose ancestors had been trained to
artistic work of this kind, and among whom the tradition
had never faded away. But this popular effect is still
more striking in the scenes where the mob of Jerusalem,
stirred up by the priests and terrified at the prospect of
Roman vengeance for the kingly claims of Christ, howls
for the release of the ruffian Barabbas (who, clothed in his
prison sackcloth, looks on with brutal enjoyment at the
scene), and for the crucifixion of Jesus. After a most
exquisite piece of music in parts,—the present music, by
the way (much of it wonderfully fine, and, I was told by
those who know more of it than myself, very original),
was composed by an Ammergau schoolmaster in 1810,
and no part of it has ever been published,—in which the
chorus pleads for the release of Jesus, while the unseen
crowds in the background respond with demands for the
release of Barabbas and the most solemn imprecations of
the blood of our Lord on themselves and their children,
the scene commences in which they fiercely urge the
crucifixion, and repel with ferocity what seem to be the
sneers of the Roman governor at their wish to have their
King crucified. There was the effect of a truly local mob,
—the effect of common habits and a common origin
about the demeanour of the multitude,—which made its
apparent passion infinitely more impressive than that of
any stage crowd I ever saw. It was a people, and not aA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

mere company of actors, a people swayed by the feeling of
vehement common interests and fears. Edward said that
Mr. Darwin should cite the Ammergau play as " a proof
of the hereditary accumulation of artistic capacities in a
selected race," whatever he meant by that; but it sounds
so well, I thought I would mention it. None of these
people get real profit by the play. I was told that the
most that players of the first class, Joseph Mair, Flunger,
and the leader of the orchestra, Herr Gutsjell, with many
others, would get in a good year, would be about £12, for
something like thirty or forty full performances (of eight
hours each) and innumerable rehearsals through the pre-
vious winter. Clearly that is no profit, but a great
pecuniary loss. This year, as the performances ended two
or three months before the usual time, I fear they will
get nothing; and perhaps the poor actors will be shot
before they feel the need of it.

But as to the tendency of the Passion Play, you may
ask, Was it to produce a deeper feeling for Christ, or to
fritter feeling away in picturesque effects ? I can only
answer for myself. I admit that in many of the audience
there were occasionally signs of a shallow and smpty
curiosity. When the liberated doves flew out of the
Temple, there was a titter; and there was an inane dis-
position to regard Judas as the comic character of the
piece,—comic on account of his failure. When he cast
down, with every sign of real despair, the thirty pieces of
silver on the floor of the treasury, I heard a distinct
giggle; and one chit of a German girl near us said to her
brother, " Ich kann nur lachen" (" I can't help laugh-164	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL#

ing"), in a weak, apologetic way, that gave me a strong
desire to order her off to bed. But nothing more exalting
than the effect apparently produced on the actors them-
selves is easily imaginable. And for myself, I can only
say that when, some Sundays later, I heard in the lesson
of the day St. John's account of the crucifixion, it came
to me with a freshness and power that made my heart
beat fast. Again I heard the oaths and jests of the
soldiers, saw the high priests wagging their wicked grey
heads, heard the people yelling "We have no king but
Caesar,'9 was filled with the majesty of that thrilling voice
which declared, " For this end was I born, and for this
cause came I into the world, that I might bear witness to
the truth;" and caught the half-supercilious, half-sad
enigma put by the Roman governor, " What is truth ? "
I can only describe the general effect produced on my
mind as the Spanish friar described to Wilkie, when
gazing in admiration at one of the Last Suppers of
Yelasquez, how the picture had so taken possession of his
imagination as to make the common events of life seem
almost unreal phantoms beside it. The Passion Play at
Ammergau had much the same effect on .my mind;—

" It seemed as though these were the living men,

And we the coloured shadows on the wall."

An Englishwoman in Difficulties.III.

To the oetzthal.

Berne, August 19, 1870.

CIR,—You can hardly conceive the strangeness of the
^ feelings with which we in Switzerland watch the
great collapse taking place in France, almost every day
bringing us notice of some new crash and some new ruin
in the empire which so lately looked as solid as it was
imposing. The late French premier, M. Ollivier, we
hear, has passed near us, carrying his " light heart" to
Culoz, after giving the Comte de Palikao that energetic
support which he promised him in the Chamber, for a
good quarter of an hour ! Whether France is still an
empire, or is a republic, or something between the two,
we hardly know. As for us " neutrals " here, we look at
the boiling ocean of war and revolution between us and
home with a strange awe and pain. It is not, even with
the women among us, fear for ourselves,—for the calm of
exhaustion must come soon, in which we English may
safely cross it. But we can't help a little sharing the
Swiss feeling, which has been from the beginning a sort
of instinctive dread of a new and fearful stride in Prussian
power. Edward says it is because the Swiss remember the166	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

Prussian threats against Neuchatel, and shudder to see a
power all but omnipotent in Europe which has once at
least, and quite recently, coveted a little bit of their poor
vineyard. But I think it is as much that the Swiss, who
have a keen feeling for the difference between appearance
and reality, have always felt that the French empire had
something about it of the " unsubstantial pageant " that
might fade and "leave not a rack behind," while they
have always entertained a very wholesome dread of the
unbroken continuity and unpleasant thoroughness of the
Prussian State. The canny Swiss, shopkeepers and all,
stick to it that they are neutral, that they have no bias or
preference at all, and now that the war has left their
frontiers, and their army is no longer needed there, they
express great relief; yet for all that they look graver and
graver, and very much as if they had been pondering on
the texts, " Destruction cometh; it cometh from the
North;" "from the North cometh a smoke, and there is
no straggler in their hosts." I am really ashamed to take
up your columns with my gossipping journal, when they
are full of so much weightier matter; but, after all, we
do want a rest sometimes from dispatches about bloody
battles, the screams of agitated assemblies, rumours of
territorial annexation, and fears of universal empire.
Nature is more than ever a rest in times like these.

We left the Bavarian Tyrol for the Austrian with some
regret. It is surely strange that in the same mountainous
regions there should be three peoples so curiously dis-
tinct in character as the handsome, frank, and gay Bava-
rians ; the sombre* not to say gloomy, but ardent TyroleseA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	167

of the Austrian Tyrol; and the kindly, but very canny,
and somewhat phlegmatic Swiss. Within two or three
miles as you cross the border, between the Bavarian and
Austrian Tyrol, the cast of face changes in the most
marked way. I told you of the charitable but grave and
stolid youth who drove us to Ammergau. Well, he was
an Austrian Tyrolese of the Vorarlberg. In Ober-
Ammergau, the whole people seemed light-hearted, and
smiling, and most of them gentle. We were charmed,
for instance, with a little lad (nothing remarkable in
himself, but we had the opportunity of making his
acquaintance) in the great wood-carving school of Ober-
Ammergau, who carved us a very pretty little crucifix,
and guided us to the top of the Kofel—a high rock about
1,000 feet above the village which it overhangs ;—perhaps
I should say rather, guided Edward to the top and me
to a platform a little below it, where I sat in the rain
bewailing my husband's rashness, as he tumbled up in his
awkward, shortsighted way, past places where I felt sure
he would break his neck, in spite of my strongest
entreaties to stay with me. To be sure, two well-to-do-
looking Bavarian women, who had availed themselves of
our little guide, were so little alarmed that they went on
with Edward and very nearly reached the top too, though
they gave up, I believe, about a minute before they would
have reached the summit; but they said it was very steep
and difficult, and complimented me on my good sense in
staying behind ; indeed, the good women had to sprawl
on a rock and pull themselves over it, by the help of
Edward's stick, which he benignantly held out to them.168	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

After all, too, Edward saw nothing in the mist, and he
ought not to have left me in that dreary place, looking at
a wet precipice for twenty minutes in anxious solitude.
However, what I was going to say was that this little
wood-carving boy, was smh a little gentleman. He
picked me all the wild strawberries he could find,—
nothing in the world is so good as Alpine strawberries,—
and had suc£ a sweet voice and cheerful face, that I took
a stroirg fancy to him. He told us he was in one of the
groups of " the people of Israel " on the Ammergau stage,
of which he appeared very proud. For his station in life,
his face, like a great many in the Bavarian Tyrol, was
wonderfully refined. I can't say, however, how far this
refinement really goes;—not nearly so far, I fancy, as
the kindliness and cheerfulness. Our driver from Am-
mergau to the Inn-thai was a very shining-faced inn-keeper
who played on the zither, but I am bound to say he was
not at all refined. He had once played on the zither
before the King of Bavaria, who was said to have been
pleased, and in that case must have been very easily
contented, for though the good man gave us some idea
of what the instrument might be in an artist's hands, he,
as he confessed,—though with a smile of harmless vanity,
as if he thought we should be of quite another mind,—
was " no artist;" but, in fact, we quite agreed with him.
He. was altogether a very amusing character. I never
saw a man who took a livelier pleasure (just a little
greasy, however) in himself aiid all that belonged to him.
As we drove out of Ammergau he nudged Edward, and
pointing to an inn, said with much importance, "MemA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	169

Gasthof" ("My inn"). Then, as we were descending
(on foot) the steep hill into Ettal, he stopped in the
middle at one of the little pictured memorials at the side
of the road, of which there are so many in the Tyrol, and
made signs of great energy to us to come back to look at
it. When we did so, he said in a most unctuous voice,
pointing at the figure of a man with a whip in his hand,
who was delineated walking up the hill beside a two-
horse carriage,—" Das war ich," " That's meant for me;"
and then went on to report that the lifeless old gentleman
depicted as stretched by the way-side was a " fare V of
his, who had been struck with apoplexy while walking
tip the hill to save his horses. When we got to Garnisch
he said, with quite the air of an historical reminiscence,
" My birth-place." But the most curious trait of all, was
his driving us round at least three good miles out of our
way, on one of these fearfully sultry days when the sun's
" going-forth is from the end of the heaven and his circuit
unto the ends of it," and " there is nothing hid from the
heat thereof," apparently only to tell us, with a sepulchral
smile, as he pointed to a public-house in a little village
entirely out of our road, " There—my mother was born."
He was very anxious we should go to an inn at Lermos
kept by " relations of mine," but this Edward declined, at
which he appeared grieved, but not angry. The next
day he told us with mild reproachfulness that we had
missed a zither entertainment of his in the evening, given
to the guests in the public room of our inn, by our
unsocial habit of keeping to our own room, adding, by
way of general reproach to those who had enjoyed the170	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

privilege we had missed, that though he played to ten
gentlemen, he got no fee for the performance. A cheer-
fuller creature, with all his greasy vanity, I never saw.
He got Edward to apply the drag for him, in going down
hill, which was done by a pressure of the foot; and the
grand air with which he would wave his hand and say,
" Enough!" when the pressure was to be relaxed, was
quite imperial.

What a road was that by way of Lermos which led us
to the valley of the Inn, and once more among the dark
and melancholy faces of the Austrian Tyrol! It circles
round the rugged mass of the Zugspitz, the highest peak of
the Bavarian Alps (over 9,000 feet high), to Lermos, where
the keen, conical Sonnenspitz, and the grim, limestone
precipices of the Wetterstein, range themselves beside it.
That evening at Lermos distant thunder rumbled all
round the basin of these great mountains, as we sat among
the new-mown hay, admiring the exquisite brilliancy of
the wild roses on the hill-side beneath us, and the glorious
colours which the veins of porphyry and of some other
almost orange stratum in the mighty Zugspitz, assumed in
the light of the rich sunset; indeed, the huge mountain
seemed to be inlaid with crimson and gold. The shadows
cast by the clouds upon its side were so soft and so blue
that they looked far more like fragrant exhalations, more
like what the Germans call " Waldes-duft," than mere
shadows; and as the cattle with their tinkling bells
wound slowly down the opposite heights in a long, thin
line, reluctant to go home, though the sun had disap-
peared for some time and even the rich after-glow wasA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	171

fading, we said to each other, in following their example
with equal reluctance, that form, colour, sound, and fra-
grance, had rarely eyer before conspired to produce in
our minds so deep an enchantment. As I write, I can
still hear the rumbling thunder, smell the rich crops of
new-mown hay and the sweet and brilliant wild roses
which made the bushes burn with a hundred flames, and
see that rich green basin surrounded by mountains so
grand and stately in their forms, that the gorgeous belts
of colour which were spread across them did not make
them look the less like "the strong foundations of the
earth,"—as the prophet (without much regard, I suppose,
to cosmogony) so finely calls them.

The next day we drove over the fine little pass through
the Wetterstein mountains to JSTasereit, with the white
and green lakes so common to mountain passes,—the
white lake glacier-fed, the green a spring-water lake,—
and the road on both sides glowing with the Alpen-rose,
the little rhododendron of the Alps, in its fullest beauty ;
and at Imst, in the valley of the Inn, took leave of our
good-natured, self-satisfied, zither-thumbing driver, and
his little dog Minnie, whom I, rendered regardful in the
matter by my own doggies at home, had persuaded to sit
between us, instead of running under a blazing sun, which
I am convinced would have given her a sunstroke. In-
deed, I tried to persuade him that dogs have sunstrokes,
but either my German or my eloquence failed me. She
sat between us accordingly with great majesty, and as our
driver went off on his return journey from Imst, I saw
with satisfaction that Minnie occupied my empty seat at172

A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

his side. From Imst we plunged into the Oetzthal,—a
cul-de-sac, opening out of the valley of the Inn, from
which I heard with panic that we could only emerge into
the valley of the Adige by passing over a glacier pass
(the Hochjoch) which it would take two hours to traverse,
so that I used to waken at night in little spasms of
uneasiness, and whimper a little privately to myself'before
going to sleep again. We entered the Oetzthal in a
mule carriage, with a young, rash, and rather showy
driver, who drove us as far as Lengenfeld. He used to
make his mules rattle down hills so steep that I had to
clutch the carriage for fear of an overturn, and also was
obliged so to manoeuvre my feet that my poor toes might
not be dashed and wrecked against the side of the car-
riage, as they sometimes were. We saw the great water-
fall at Umhausen under a scorching sun, which made me
a little indifferent to the exquisite curve of its leaping
waters, and the lovely rainbow which spanned its second
descent. Then we drove up by the most raging of all
raging glacier torrents, the ferocious Fischbach, which
for many miles boils down the valley, tearing and leaping
against every rock and bridge as if it were frantic for
destruction, and in point of fact injuring bridges almost
daily, and sweeping to their deaths every spring and
summer many of the Tyrolese workmen who repair them.
The guides always beg you to start early in the morning
in this valley, for, as the noon comes on, the glacier
streams begin to swell, and go on swelling till near mid-
night, often injuring the bridges and rendering them
impassable. At Lengenfeld the bridge had been recentlyA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

*73

injured, and we had to leave our mule carriage on the
other side, the grave Tyrolese workmen transporting our
little belongings to the inn. Near Solden, farther up the
valley, a bridge was totally destroyed, and we had to
climb over the shoulder of the mountain,—a glorious
walk,—with our "bearer," a spare-looking old man,
who transported all our luggage, near a hundredweight
and a half, on his single back; and yet though thus
handicapped, he climbed the steep mountain-side a great
deal faster than we. It was on this journey that we
found the great turn-cap lily and the lovely little Linnsea
Borealis growing wild in some profusion. From Solden
we got a mule for our baggage, and continued our way on
foot into this grand and often gloomy valley, the glaciers
growing nearer, and the thickets of Alpen-rose richer,
and the soil less fruitful at every step. Beyond Solden
there were no inns of the ordinary sort. At Heiligkreuz
and at Fend, the Catholic priest allows his housekeeper to
entertain strangers, charging them some very moderate
price for the expense and trouble, while he himself cor-
dially welcomes them to his hospitable " inn of the Cure/5
as it is called, anxiously inquiring about the state of the
bridges down below, and grateful for any gossip even
from heretic countries. These priests are generally
splendid mountaineers, though not always very fond of
the mountains. The kind cure of Heiligkreuz told Edward
he yearned for a flat country. For eleven years he had
lived in one where the only flat piece of ground was his
own churchyard. However, he had been recently
appointed to a cure in the neighbourhood of Imst in the174-	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

Inn-thai, where at least a few square miles of tolerably
level country can be obtained by keeping to the line of
the river Inn. And so at length, I on mule-back, and
Edward walking, we arrived at the close of our cul-de-sac,
Fend, of which I can give you no better description than
an attempt at translation from the somewhat rough and
metaphysical student-poet Hausan, who gives, however, a
fair conception of Fend, with an extract from which I
will close my letter :—

" Beyond the church and village bright
The Thaleit rears its awful height,

Tow'ring far back into the light
Or clouded air;

The Similaun's smooth dome of snows,

Whence the great stream of glacier flows,

Eastwards a brooding pallor [bleichen Lichtdunst] throws,

A frigid glare [halten Glanz].

Far in the north the snowy line
Of Stubay peaks and glaciers shine,

While shades of distance strong or fine
Draw out the view;

And near me on the pine-clad fells
The ice-fed torrent roars and swells,

As noon replenishes the wells
Which night withdrew."

—rugged translation and rugged verse, but like the
place.—I am, Sir, &c.,

An Englishwoman in Difficulties.IV.

The Pass of the Hochjoch.

Bekne, August 26, 1870.

ESTERDAY we were in the fine cathedral here,

listening to some pieces on the organ played by the
organist, a composer as well as a player of great merit.
The organ itself is almost too powerful for the cathedral;
at least it was not till we had retreated to the extreme
end from it—driven away partly by odious chatterers who
had no feeling for the music, and partly by the pain it
caused to our ears—that we could enjoy it. The last piece
the organist played, when the cathedral was in complete
darkness, except that two feeble candles glimmered from
the organ-loft, called, as we afterwards heard, "Das
Grewitter" ("The Tempest "), moved us very powerfully.
Had the war suggested it, or only those grand thunder-
storms which, visible and perhaps grandest from the
terrace outside this very Berne Cathedral, break every
other day, sometimes twice or three times in the same day,
over the Alps of the Oberland, and frequently, if the clouds
have happened to drift away, light up the huge white
towering mass of the Jungfrau, or the vast snow slopes of
the Eiger, or the keen, sharp needle of the Finsteraar-176	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

horn, with a sudden but momentary glare ? Whichever
it was, it was the finest sound-picture I ever heard. First,
the melancholy whistle of the rising wind was heard,
occasionally passing into fitful shrieks, high up in the
great heights of the darkness above us; then came the
rushing and booming of the storm in its full force, the
crash of the thunder, the swishing drifts of gusty rain,
and great discharges of wind-artillery on the ear; and
finally you heard soft and sweet notes prevailing over the
undertones of fury as the storm died away, as if the com-
poser had had in his mind the words of the Psalm, " The
Lord also thundered out of heaven, and the Highest gave
his thunder, hailstones, and coals of fire; He sent out
his arrows and scattered them; He cast forth light-
nings and destroyed them.....He shall send down from

on high to fetch me, and shall take me out of many waters
As we came out the organist was just descending from
his lair, and his pale, deeply-lined face—the face of a
worn and solitary student in middle life—was lit up by
the two dips before referred to, which had been brought
down before him. My husband asked if he might be told
the name of the composer, and whether the piece was
published, to which the courteous reply was given that
the piece was the player's own composition, and that it
had never been published,—and with that we had to be
content. Whether the composer had had solely the great
natural tempests of Switzerland in his mind as he wrote it
or not,—which, of course, we did not venture to ask,—
we could not help interpreting it by reference to a more
awful tempest, and hoping that those sweeter notes ofA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	177

victory beneath which the tempest sank to rest, might
before long find their analogue, little likely as it seemed
at present, in the close of the great struggle. You see
the result of all our patient waiting here is at present only
the hoping against hope that the calm imaginations of
peaceful men may furnish omens for the issue of a bloody
and ferocious strife.

I told you in my last letter about the " inn of the
Cure " at Heilegkreuz and Fend. Well, the take-off to
" inns of the Cure " is this,—that they usually exist in
villages so small that there are no regular tradespeople of
any sort there, and all that is essential to the village,—
carpentering, clock-making, cobbling, baking, butchering,
&c.,—has to be done in the Cure's own house. Even that
would not be so unpleasant if they wouldn't do the
butcher's work in the passage, just opposite the dining-
room, so that you see the gory morsels in preparation
even while you are expected to eat others which have
undergone a slender disguise. This is a practice con-
ducive to faintness and nausea, but not to appetite. Poor
dear Edward, who is as blind as a mole, and sees nothing
that is not pointed out to him, was quite unaware of what
was going on in our vicinity, and would never have dis-
covered it had he not observed that I could eat nothing,
and was getting into what he called my lackadaisical fits
about the foreign food. So I had to explain to him the
cause of my rapidly increasing indisposition to eat, and
then he shut the door on the objectionable objects, and
began to lecture on the necessity of eating against incli-
nation if I could not eat with it, and indulged in various

N178	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

prophetic sketches of my condition at night and next day
if I refused my dinner, which was at once lively and true,
but irrelevant, since by that time no force could have
got any portion of that beef down my throat;—the ter-
rible woman had said confidentially the previous day,
" To-morrow you can have beef, for we kill to-morrow
which she did, and had it publicly hewed in pieces into
the bargain. How could one eat the twin dish, as it were,
to that raw horror which was then being held up to view
by the unsavoury young man who was hacking and chop-
ping away under the staircase opposite the door of the
dining-room ? So we had a little scene, and I cried, and
Edward stormed and entreated by turns, and I got down
some wine and bread, and two or three mouthfuls of that
detestable "Nudelsuppe,"-—pale warm water (supposed to
be broth) containing vermicelli flavoured with some nasty
spice,—and then we retired in discomfort to our pretty
little room, where, of course, I strictly verified Edward's
predictions, though some cups of our own excellent tea
and very fair bread and butter just got me through the
day. "What added to my depression, besides incipient
famine, was that the weather looked very like change,
and our mules were ordered for that awful Hochjoch,—
as high as the Stelvio, and with two good hours3 walk
on an open glacier,—for the next morning. It was
some comfort that two German gentlemen and a lady,
a professor, his wife, and his wife's brother, were bound
for the same high destiny. But with a chill night, a
drizzling rain falling at times, the mists arbitrarily shift-
ing from the high retreating cone of the Thaleit toA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	179

the smooth white cap of the Similaun, and back again,
and that awful pass before us, on which the good priest,
our host,—most brilliant of mountaineers,—had once
spent twenty-two hours, and just escaped with his life,
not two years ago,—to be sure, that was in November,—
while his guide, the hero of the Oetzthal, Cyprian Gran-
bichler, perished from exhaustion before reaching his
home, leaving his desolate mother to flit about like the
melancholy ghost we saw her in the " inn of the Cure "
so long as her sad life should last,—with all these dis-
couraging images before me, you will not wonder that I
whimpered myself to sleep.

At four next morning the inexorable Edward was stump-
ing about in his heavy boots, ascending into the carpen-
ter-, cobbler-, and watchmaker-haunted attic to look at
the barometer, taking opinions from early labourers who
gave him no comfort, and finally ordering me to sleep
again for another hour till we had more certain presages
of the weather. At half-past five he became sanguine,
routed me up, showed me triumphantly a bit of blue sky
and a gleam of sun, made light of the heavy mists, and
gave marching orders below. Before I went down-stairs,
—or down ladder, rather, for the stairs were as steep
as a ladder,—I heard the downfall of a fellow-mortal,
and shuddered, resolving to take heed to my own steps.
Alas ! we heard later in the day that it was the Pro-
fessor's wife, who began the toils of her ascent of the
Hochjoch by glissading (involuntarily) down something
worse, for that purpose, than snow-slopes,—the rugged
stairs of the worthy Cure. Heroic Maria ! Spartan-likei8o	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

she suppressed her pain, and rising at the foot of Pastor
Senn's staircase, declared her unchanged intention to
proceed up the Hochjoch. And, in fact, they were off
before us, on foot, accompanied, rather than led, by a
conceited guide and a lively little puppy six months old,
to whose safe conduct over the pass the guide humanely
but inhumanly devoted himself far more closely than to
that of the Frau Professorinn. As for us, we started with
three mules, one for Edward, one for myself, and one for
our baggage. The morning looked hopeful as we started,
and as we passed through Rofen, the highest village in
the Tyrol, crossed the raving Ache, and left the monument
to poor Cyprian Granbichler, erected in the lonely fir-
wood where he died, on our left hand, my fears began to
abate, in spite of the fearful precipices shooting right
down to the torrent on our right. Soon we saw the
remains of the Yernagt Glacier peeping over our path,
like the horrid effigy in snow of Titanic tooth-fangs
already in decay. Then we had to get off our mules
and walk down the steep path which leads over the
debris of this retreating glacier, mined by deep wind-
ing caves of dirty ice, looking greedy and horrible,
—jaws of hell. Soon we began to gain on our German
friends, poor Maria finding the ascent of the Hochjoch
none the easier for the glissade on Pastor Senn's stair-
case. The guide, too, had had an alarm for his puppy.
In crossing one of the glacier torrents which dashed
across our path, the puppy was carried down the stream
and very nearly lost,—only just saved by a projecting
stone. When at length we passed them, just as theA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	181

great glacier of the Langtaufererjoch, and the one we had
to pass, that of the Hochjoch, came clear into view, the
mists began to fall heavily. The Weisskugel was soon
hidden. Soon they fell low enough to touch the glaciers,
and the desolation of this wild scene of lonely glaciers
and lonelier summits was profound. It was nine o'clock,
too,—-an ominous hour for such a turn in the weather.
We interchanged condolences with our fellow-wayfarers,
and agreed to tarry together in the shell of a new hos-
pice just at the edge of the glacier, in the hope of better
weather. An ambitious German, bent on passing the
Langtaufererjoch,—a pass difficult at all times, and
very dangerous in heavy mist,—was dissuaded by his
guide from the attempt, and returned to Fend. Our
muleteers, on the contrary, said we might just as well go
on as go back ; we should get wet either way, but one
way was as safe as the other. So we crowded into the
shell of the future hospice, where a man was found with
some wine, a seat or two, a bed of hay, and, best of all, a
fire-place and some logs. Our mules went in with us,
and were quartered in the unfloored rooms beyond us. It
was a picturesque sight; the fire soon burnt merrily, and
I toasted my toes over it; the puppy nestled in the bed
of hay; the muleteers and the guide of our German
friends lighted their pipes and sang snatches of comic
songs ; the Professor and his brother-in-law smoked cigars
and drank wine; the much-enduring Maria consumed
hard-boiled eggs, and proposed that we should act a scene
from the Walpurgisnacht,—the witch scene on the
Brocken,—in the desolation outside; her husband the182	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

Professor declared gallantly with a kiss that it was impos-
sible she should enact a witch ; Edward kept dashing into
the rain to see how things looked, ransacked his pockets
somewhat ruefully for a crust two days old, and broke the
Tenth Commandment in reference to his neighbour's
hard-boiled eggs ; finally, the mules looked calmly in
upon us from their several apartments, and the rain
descended heavily.

At last the guides said there was no hope of improve-
ment, and there was fear of something worse,—the rain
might turn into snow, and make the glacier walking very
heavy ; so we sallied forth with all the wraps on us we
could contrive, and soon reached the edge of the glacier.
The puppy's guide,—he paid no attention to poor Maria,
—had invented four socks for him to cross the ice in,
because his paws on a previous occasion had been wounded
and frost-bitten. On the glacier it was bitterly cold.
Edward said his hands were freezing, and after the first
ten minutes, when the glacier became less steep, he got
off his mule and took to walking to warm himself. There-
upon it was suggested that poor Maria, who was much
exhausted, might ride, though the saddle was not a lady's
saddle. And she was only too glad. Indeed, she told
me afterwards that but for this timely assistance she must
have given in ; and " giving in " in the middle of a dreary
glacier meant, I suppose, ceasing to be a Frau Profes-
sorinn, or to be at all, altogether. She tried, first, riding
like a lady, but the muleteers promptly remonstrated, and
said she must " balanciren sich," " balance herself," or,
in more popular language, sit astride; which she madeA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	183

no difficulty about. Edward valiantly grasped his mule's
tail with his left hand and followed in Maria's wake, feel-
ing, as I had subsequent reason to believe, a good deal of
delicate embarrassment at his close and admirable view of
a very well-filled and large but bespattered white stock-
ing, which occupied so prominent a place in the fore-
ground of his landscape as occasionally to eclipse a peak
or a glacier. The Professor availed himself freely of my
mule's tail; and Otto, who at first declined tail-help, was
soon observed to be attached in like manner to the same
useful membrane in the baggage mule. The muleteers,
in their flowing blankets, their heads thrust through
holes made on purpose in. the middle of the blankets,
guided the mules; the buskined puppy frisked over the
ice; and his Tyrolese guide, with jaunty air, hummed
and whistled as he closely watched his darling's move-
ments. Soon the snow fell thick. Now and then the
mists rose and disclosed the Wildspitz or the Kreuzspitz,
or the "Weisskugel, and great sheets of sweeping glaciei
on all sides of us. But generally we saw little except the
white expanse before us, the falling snow, and ghosts of
mighty mountains looming indistinctly through the mists.
At last the glacier began to slope somewhat downwards,
and soon we reached its verge, and saw its bright green
ice-needles quite free from snow hanging over the valley
of the Schnalser, into which we were to descend. Here
we left our mules, for the descent was too steep for riding
of any kind, and poor Maria had again to lament the
negligence of her guide, who now devoted himself to dis-
engaging his puppy from his snow-shoes and making expe-i8|	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

riments on his riding powers, mounting him on the back
of one of the vacant mules, a seat which he did not long
maintain. I was lucky enough to be assisted by a most
polite chamois-hunter, who joined us at this critical
moment Perhaps he had been in pursuit of a formidable
bear which dwelt in these parts, and which had quite
lately destroyed fifteen sheep in a neighbouring flock,—
the remains of some of which we saw, and also very
unpleasantly smelt. If so, he had not succeeded in find-
ing his bear, and was going home without his booty. To
me he was invaluable in that rough, steep, muddy descent;
and he picked the Alpen-roses for me, too, as well as
arrested • my sliding steps. We were not sorry to reach
Kurzras, where we got hard-boiled eggs to our hearts'
content,—our German friends indulging in " Nudel-
suppe" of the most objectionable kind,—and where the
little waitress, touched with the gift of twopence more
than she expected, seized Edward's hand, and kissed it
with enthusiasm. Rain, thick rain, all the way to Unser
Frau, — a beautiful meadow path,— so that we went
straight to bed there, pending the preparation of tea,
while a smiling Tyrolese waiter, in shirt-sleeves, appa-
rently got up, in dress, features, and all, for the stage of
a comic theatre in England, was so much occupied in his
own deep surprise and self-congratulation at in some degree
understanding us, that he regarded the satisfaction of our
wants as a matter of comparatively remote interest. And
here practically we parted from our German friends. I
watched pensively the eiAbarrassment-generating stockings
hanging out to dry at the inn the next morning, partiallyA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	185

cleansed of their stains ; and then we went on our way,
and thought to see them no more. Nor do I think that
we did; but once and again we exchanged a greeting with
their amiable wearer and her companions,—first in the
post-carriage on the way to Meran ; then in that pictur-
esque arcade of the old city, " Unter den Lauben." The
last thing we heard of them was that they were bound to
the Lago di Grarda; but the following day came the tele-
gram of the declaration of war by France ; the Germans
in Meran, going about with anxious hearts and troubled
brows, mostly hurried back to their homes ; and I much
fear that the Landwehr has already claimed the youngest
of our three companions, and that he is by this time
recalling with tenderness in many a heavy march, the
assistance he derived from that despised mule's tail on
the Hochjoch, and regretting that the Kronprinz and
Prince Friedrich Karl provide no such adventitious
aid for their severely-taxed Landwehr. Fare thee well,
brave, much-enduring Maria ! May we yet meet again
where mules and mules' tails are as precious to us as they
were on the ice of the Hochjoch.—I am, Sir, &c.,

An Englishwoman in Difficulties.Y.

Meran to St. Moritz.

Berne, September 3, 1870.

IR,—So the Imperial bubble has burst at last. With
the Emperor the captive of the King of Prussia,
Marshal MacMahon and his army in the Prussian,power,
Marshal Bazaine and Metz beyond hope, we are beginning
to think that Paris may be saved, this fearful war cut
short, and last and least, our return to England through
France made easy. But what a change in the kaleido-
scope since we passed through Paris about two months
ago, when neither war nor catastrophe of any kind was
dreamt of by any one! Berne is awe-struck. On the
Cathedral terrace this evening we were watching a yellow,
Cuyp-like sunset, as it bathed in a flood of saffron that
great snow range, the spectacle of which, when it is
granted, makes Berne the most delightful of European
cities;—by the way, we see it to perfection, when it is
visible at all, even from our hotel, and often in a clear
moonlight night or a lovely dawn I get out of bed to
enjoy the wonderful and tranquillizing vision. Well, as
we watched, and the yellow flood crept over the cold
snowy cowl of the " Great Monk," as the Jungfrau'sA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	187

grandest neighbour is called, Edward, whose mind was in
the scene before Sedan, and who can talk of nothing but
what he calls the moral causes for the Prussian victories
and for the ruin of the French Empire, was muttering
audibly enough, " I know that all things come to an end,
but Thy commandment is exceeding broad ; " whereupon
a gentleman near,—a Roman Catholic priest probably,
from his dress, for though Berne is chiefly Protestant,
there is a fair number of Roman Catholics here,—with
his eyes fixed on the glittering mountain, said aloud, as if
in reply, " Illuminans tu mirabiliter a montibus eternis,
turbati sunt omnes insipientes corde,"—or, as Edward
translated it to me, " Wonderfully thy light shone out
from the eternal mountains, and all the foolish in heart
were put to confusion." I suppose it was from the Bible,
though I don't remember any such passage in the Bible,
and probably it may be something the Catholics have
altered,—but it struck us as wonderfully grand at the
moment,—whether he quoted it as a Swiss Republican,
and his " eternal mountains" were the Bernese Ober-
land, or whether he spoke as a Roman Ultramontane,
and the Oberland were to him but a symbol of those
seven hills beyond, which stand around the infallible
Doctor of the Vatican. Though I can hardly make out
the Latin words, they run curiously in my head,—" Illu-
minans tu mirabiliter a montibus eternis,"—how finely it
expresses the wild unearthly glory of these Alps in sun-
set, which would be dreamlike were they not so real and
solid in their grandeur that they put dreams to shame,
and seem, as the Catholic priest suggested, the very188	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

symbols of that Power which dispels the " unsubstantial
pageants" of the foolish in heart, and leaves not a
" wrack behind."

In 'the midst of such events, I cannot but feel, as ever
since the declaration of war we have both felt, that there
is a certain incongruity between tourists and the times;
and, indeed, from the day we reached Meran and found
war impending, we have gone about gazing at the beauty
and grandeur of the various scenes we have visited, a
little absently, like dreamers in a very light sleep who
know that they are dreaming, and that there is something
very different to waken up to, from the images which
seem to rivet their attention. I shall not trouble you,
therefore, much more, especially as the latter part of our
journey was through Swiss scenes with which nearly
every one is familiar. Before we got to Meran, our whole
minds were in the scenery,—since then the scenery has
only been in our minds, and not always so much as that.
Yet Meran was lovely. How I enjoyed the evening walks
there, by the rushing Passeyr, which, flowing out of
Andrew Hofer's bleak valley, the rather dismal Passeyr-
thal, suddenly finds itself, as it enters the rich semi-
Italian vale of the Adige, the very life and soul of a
pretty Southern city, lapped in purple mountains which
have, though with deeper colouring, a soft Irish tinge of
beauty over them, and something about their saw-like
outline which reminded me of MacGillycuddy's Reeks
at Killarney magnified in scale. One evening we had a
lovely sunset-gleam poured over the rugged dolomite
peaks far beyond Botzen; they shone out in the faintA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	189

clear beauty of an amber distance long after the rich por-
phyry mountains between had turned almost black, and
even at Meran itself the dusk was coming slowly on. The
Passeyr, not yet united with the Adige, rushed with a
delicious sound at our feet; here and there grand old
castles gleamed out above the loaded vines, which are
trained picturesquely over horizontal trellis-work all down
the valley; wild clouds drifted over some of the notches
in the saw-edged mountains, while the outlines of other
notches glistened against the evening sky with all the
prismatic colours ; the Tyrolese women, trooping out from
Meran, where they had been marketing, carefully took off
their shoes and put them in their baskets as they trudged
back to their country homes, —the vesper bell was ringing
in the churches ; altogether, the wide, soft valley was full
of beauty and peace, with that distant fringe of pale
pink ruggedness to remind us of grander worlds beyond.
Greatly, too, I enjoyed our shoppings in those picturesque
arcades, " IJnter den Lauben," where each shop has a
stone bench facing it, just across the pavement, on which
the women usually sit and work on warm days while they
watch their shops,—of which the interiors often stretch
so far back that you can see people coming and going
apparently in a remote distance at the end of a long per-
spective of rooms and passages, much as if you were look-
ing at them with a reversed opera-glass. Here we spent
a long morning, buying various funny little things, and
coveting more, which the apoplectic state of our portman-
teau would not allow me even to ask for. Edward fitted
himself with a Tyrolese blanket, for use in his many wet19o	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

rides at home, the Tyrolese shopwoman deriving great
amusement from the prospect of seeing him so enveloped,
as she measured his head for the necessary aperture in the
middle, which she was to cut and bind for him. When it
came home he said she had made it what the Welshman
called such a " tamned tight squeeze " that there was no
allowance made for his nose, and it had to go back to be
made bigger. I got a straw hat with a brim so enor-
mously wide that the shadow which it casts constantly causes
unexpected " obscurations " and " eclipses " of terrestrial
objects, and it is quite impossible to see any prospect in
it; but then I want it for gardening in, when one's
regards are downward fixed, on a small spot of earth, and
a complete shelter from the sun is desirable. Whether it
were quite worth while to add a new article to our lug-
gage quite unpackable, and one, moreover, very difficult
to remember, so that we generally have to send our guide
back for it when we are half up a rainy mountain, I am
not quite sure. Then we got Tyrolese hair-pins, and
horn spoons with all sorts of queer devices painted in the
bowls,—for instance, chamois cocking their eyes disdain-
fully at sheepish-looking chamois-hunters, — Tyrolese
ptarmigan feathers, and, oddest of all, a pretty white bed-
quilt, of all things in the world, which nearly did cause
what our local surgeon grandly terms " extravasation in
the veins " of our already apoplectic portmanteau ; but I
find that if I don't make Edward buy me useful things in
my holiday, I hardly have another chance all the year
round. I often have to get another box on our return to
carry " the adhesives," as we call them, of our journey;A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	191

for instance, I have been buying Appenzell curtains for
my little drawing-room only to-day, and do what I will,
it must make a seventh, package; for my portmanteau,—
which we early gave up all idea of locking,—has now got
to that bulging condition which renders the mere idea of
locking it, an idea of the most violent paradox and humorous
contradiction. Yet there is a specific flavour of extrar
enjoyment,—perhaps, like the taste for curacoa, there is
something artificial about it,—in the annexation of some
fresh articles of home-use when the possibilities of packing
have been apparently more than exhausted, and yet you
know in your heart you can find a place somehow, if only
you can persuade your husband,—and Edward is an angel
in that way,—to sit rather longer on the portmanteau
and get rather hotter over the tug at it, than hitherto.
I confess I seldom enjoyed a day's shopping more than
that day at Meran " Unter den Lauben."

And now I must begin what I may call a masterly
summary of the remainder of our journey, for I know
that even your kindness may be exhausted, and I am fast
approaching the region of Mr. Cook and his " personally-
superintended " tours. From Meran we ascended the
valley of the Adige to Mais, catching one splendid glance
of the mighty Orteler, whose dome and' the peak above it
both slightly incline, as if in homage, towards Italy, and
of the vast ice-fields which reflect the sunset, as from a
looking-glass, many miles to the north, often as far as the
valley of the Inn, whence in former years we have gazed
on it from Nauders. From Mais we struck off into the
poverty-stricken, dreary Munsterthal, hardly yet piercedA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

by any decent road, which connects Switzerland with the
Tyrol, and leads out into the Engadin (in the Grisons) at
Zernetz. We were no sooner among the Swiss,—even
though in this Munsterthal it was amongst the hungriest
and poorest, who, by their own accounts, scarcely ever see
the face of the stranger who enriches so greatly the Swiss
of Western Switzerland,—than we found the difference to
our purse, paying three times as much at first for worse
fare and worse accommodation. At Munster we had to
wait while a one-horse cart was literally built for us.
Only two flat and cracked planks on four wheels were
brought out, without any sides or seats, or apparent capa-
city for sides or seats at all. But first they lashed on
sides and then a back, and then tied in a sort of throne,
and at last made up a pretty tolerable cart, in which we
managed to travel fairly enough, under the guidance of a
Swiss charioteer, who entirely declined to believe in the
war, asserting that his Government always had and dif-
fused early telegraphic information of everything,—and
there, certainly, were the wires, though the road on which
we had to travel was the roughest of mountain tracks.
Desolate indeed was that cart-journey in a pouring rain,
over the Ofen, to the village, or rather hut, of that name
where we made shift to sleep,—though I still remember
with keen pleasure the barren valley, just below the
summit of the pass, where a shepherd, with the regular
shepherd's crook, a large flock of sheep on his right hand,
and of goats on his left, stood quite stiffly,—they were
the only living creatures we had seen for miles,—as if he
were standing for some Mediaeval artist to sketch theA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	193

scene for an illustration of tlie New Testament; nor can
I soon forget the turf roads, with low woods on either
side, like the avenues of some neglected " chase," by
which we descended to Ofen, for here our driver told us
that bears still harbour,—one he had, to his great horror,
met himself, in this immediate neighbourhood, when
driving alone and unarmed on a return journey of this
kind, but the creature instead of attacking him had
walked slowly away when he shouted.

From Zernetz we ascended the valley of the Inn to St.
Moritz, under the care of a phlegmatic child-driver of
twelve years old, who was greeted with congratulatory
enthusiasm by all his friends in the villages of the
Engadin,—for no doubt it was his first experiment as
independent driver,—but who caused me much anguish
of mind as he descended the hills, from the extreme
closeness with which his horse shaved the corners. Be-
sides, the drag was out of order,—he called in a sort of
coroner's jury at Zuz to assist at a post-mortem exami-
nation on it,—and though I had fortunately slept through
the worst descents, when I finally woke up, my anxieties
were dreadful. It was all very well for the friends of the
young hero to congratulate him on emerging into life as a
driver, but why should our costly lives furnish the materials
for his training ? In the town of St. Moritz,—we were
going to Bad St. Moritz, half a mile farther,—the infant
actually held a levee, or sort of court, on the pretext that
the heavily-laden coaches in Ijhe street would not allow
him to pass. Edward, who has almost every virtue but
patience, got so impatient at last, and addressed the wee

oA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

charioteer in such, violent German, that one of the glitter-
ing ring of acquaintances around him kindly piloted our
carriage past the crowded post-coaches for him, and the
infant resumed his seat. At Bad St. Moritz we were
more than welcome. The Queen of Wurtemberg, the
Grand Duchess of Baden, and all their suites, had left
within the last forty-eight hours, recalled by telegraph to
Germany. The war had already made pacific vacancies in
the crowded ranks of the St. Moritz bathers, and we were
received, I may say, with distinction. Six waiters took
each a package, and we were ushered to our room with all
the ceremony of travellers who venture to travel in the
teeth of a declaration of war. We found kind friends
there, who made our days delightful in that most glorious
of the Alpine valleys of the Grisons. The place is too
widely known now to need any description of mine.
More various beauty it would be hard to find than in that
valley, itself near 7,000 feet high, threaded by a chain
of four lovely green lakes, and surrounded on both sides
by towering peaks and ghostly glaciers. Quiet, bonny
Celerina, in a flood of evening light, lying beneath the
gloomy and barren peak called the Piz Ot,—a peak which
looks as if the mountain had been beheaded in ages long
gone by, and a frowning pile from some other quarter of
the globe transferred to its huge shoulders, for which it is
quite too small, though in aspect so forbidding ;—the truly
emerald lake of St. Moritz, with the lovely little Linnma
horealts clustering thick upon its banks,—the Campfer
lake, less green and smaller, but very lovely, which
nestles between the lake of St. Moritz and that of Silva-A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	195

plana; while the fourth and largest of the quartet, the
lake of Sils, at the foot of the grim glacier of Fex, com-
pletes the chain of lakes from which one branch of the Inn
is fed;—the rich and lovely Italian peep over the Maloja
Pass;—the rugged heights of the Bernina, with those
marvellous twin glaciers,—the beautiful Eoseg, with its
snow-white purity and its fair soft curves, and that
frozen tempest, the savage Morderatsch,—all come back
to me as pictures which I can never cease to enjoy, even
though they grow dimmer with the growing years, " till
memory cease to paint the past." But I must not enlarge
on ground so familiar. Grant me space for one more
letter, and I will bring our wanderings to an end, with a
few terse remarks to travellers of my own class who,
without any particular desire for " roughing it," yet love
to escape from the well-worn tracks of the bloated tourist,
like your obedient servant,

An Englishwoman in Difficulties.YI.

St. Moritz to Berne.

Berne, September 10, 1870.

QIR,—Can you tell me whether the French Republic
will acknowledge a Cook's Return Ticket from
London to Paris given under the Empire. Shall I admit
that we have been staying here all this time, although the
Rhine has been long open, because I could not find it in
my heart to let Edward sacrifice, with his usual pecuniary
rashness, the prepaid cost of the return journey from Paris
to London; and now a horrible doubt strikes me whether,
as M. Jules Favre is said to repudiate so much that was
done by the French people under the Empire, the Chemin
de Fer de l'Ouest will not also repudiate the engagements
made with Mr. Cook under the old regime. If a siege of
Paris should really intervene, I suppose we must give it
up, but if peace is made under the walls of Paris, could
you not suggest to Count Bismarck to put in a clause
impressing on the various railways of France the neces-
sity of keeping their obligations to Mr. Cook's tourists ?
Is this suggestion very womanish ? Perhaps it is; but
really, you know, it would be horrid, after waitingA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL,	197

all this time, to find any hitch about the ticket after
all. Edward wanted to go back by the Rhine, but
besides the pecuniary sacrifice, Mr. Ripley, that excellent
gentleman who superintends toe of Cook's tours for him,
tells us here that French peasants (franc-tireurs I suppose)
have been firing on the Rhine trains, and though Mr.
Ripley seemed to think his disclosures likely to be gene-
rally attractive to tourists—I suppose as giving them a
faint taste of the excitement of war without any exertion—
they did not strike me in that light; and I set my face
entirely against Edward's proposal to run the gauntlet
of such dangers. If, indeed, we had a Cook's ticket
by that line of railway, I might be tempted to run the
risk, but as it is, I must protest against a step which com-
bines extravagance and danger. "We cannot help believing
here that King William is going to Paris only to conclude
a peace before its walls. By all accounts, the French will
give up a good deal, though they will not give up territory;
and Swiss opinion is naturally very warm in their favour
now that they are both republican-minded and disposed to
surrender a standing army, and rely, like the Swiss them-
selves, on a drilled people for self-defence. The Germans,
Victor Hugo magnificently says, cannot be going "to
personify barbarism decapitating civilisation," or, as he
puts it, in still more striking language, " Germania cannot
be going to lift the axe against Gaul;" and, of course,
when you use the Latin names for the two countries, you
see how much greater a crime it is than when you use the
modern names. Switzerland does not seem to have any
■public writer who knows how to write quite like that, but198	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

there is, nevertheless, a pretty strong business-like feeling
that to destroy Paris only to squeeze out a cession of
territory, would be voluntarily buying a great calamity
for Germany, as well as paying a vast price for it. But
to return to our Cook's ticket, the interesting point for me
just now. Victor Hugo says, indeed, " Paris is nothing
else but one immense hospitality," which may be true, but
seems an inaccurate description of the fashion in which
Paris (not the Emperor or his Government) recently treated
the poor German residents there; but still it may, at all
events, mean that Cook's tourists will be welcome. Only
this great organ of republican feeling goes on to say:—

"The Empire is dead. It is well;

We have nothing in common with this corpse.

It is the past: we are the future.

It is hatred: we are sympathy.

It is Capua and Gomorrha: we are France "—

with much else quite too eloquent to be understood; but I
want to know if the future is going to take up the obliga-
tions of the past, if France is going to take up the obliga-
tions of Capua and Gomorrha (no doubt a formidable
thing to propose), and so forth. If it won't, I don't
know whether either Count Bismarck or Cook's tourists
will be satisfied, and it's really no use being even "one
immense hospitality " just on the eve of a bombardment.

But I must relieve you from my gossip, which I will
try to do quickly. One afternoon, at St. Moritz, Edward
and I mounted into the banquette of a Chiavenna dili-
gence—a delightful seat it was on the top of the diligence,
only holding two persons, and separated by the whole roof"A HOLIDAY IN. THE TYROL.	199

of the carriage and the piled luggage from the other
seats—and swept away past the four emerald lakes and
the grim glaciers to the Maloja Pass, down which the six
horses dived with wonderful courage, the great unwieldy
vehicle behind them very nearly taking the posts set to
mark more distinctly the points of the zig-zags. Each of
the four wheels was clogged with a great shoe, or the
coach must have rushed against the horses' heels and
driven them, and us too, to destruction; but as it was, we
got safe to the bottom, and, with long thirsty intervals of
stopping for the mails, alleviated by frothing ale, during
which it amused me much, after we were really in Italy,
to watch the groups of young girls knitting and talking
together, some of whom, not twelve years old, used ges-
tures as eager, and flashed forth glances as eloquent as if
they had been sitting on committees of public safety, and
after a glorious evening drive beneath multitudes of green
Alps, and the grandest mountain ridges, past graceful
groves of twisted chestnuts, towards the richest of purple
distances, we entered Chiavenna, where the driver exe-
cuted a grand superfluous circuit, in order to show off his
horses and his skill in driving, and then deposited us at a
very pleasant inn, the new arrangements of which, with its
light, elegant furniture, bare floors, the little tripods to
hold the basins, the multitudes of doors and open windows,
and the ample sense of space, with the large balconies,
inner court-yard, and wide passages, gave us an immediate
feeling of a new land and a great desire to stay in it if we
could. But it would not do. The heat was tremendous,
so tremendous that we could not sleep. The party at the200

A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

late dinner, in spite of the room being open to the air all
round, looked like Peter Bell's celebrated " party in the
parlour/' " all silent and all damned;" and I felt sure
that even a day or two of such weather at Como would
make me as limp as if I were a mere wisp of feeble good-
nature, and give me a sick-headache into the bargain.
So we resisted Como, and ordered an early Einspanner for
the Spliigen, which accordingly we crossed the next day,
repassing from heat through sharpish cold to the pretty
village of Spliigen, where the Hinter-Rhein rushes down
from the Bernardino. A lovely walk we had that night
on the green mountain-side, towards a lonely thread of
waterfall, which we could see for some miles off, in full
view of the great snow-fields of the Einshorn, and with
thin, fiery clouds chasing each other swiftly along the
summits of the mountains, as if intent on trailing a pencil
of flame over their outlines, to fix them on our memory.

Then wTe followed down the course of the Hinter-
Rhein to its junction with the Yorder-Rhein at pic-
turesque Reichenau, where the wide valley in the angle
between the two meeting rivers is dotted thick with
low puddingy hills, all covered for miles and miles with
thick woods, while vineyards (this year sadly burnt up
with the fierce sun) run along the low banks of the infant
Rhines, and glacier-patches in the region of the Oberland
tower up faintly in the west, whence the Yorder-Rhein
comes dowTn. I have delightful memories of that long
drive from Reichenau to Dissentis, beside the dwindling
stream of the Yorder-Rhein, which we crossed and recrossed
repeatedly on the way; and of the dreary precipices ofA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	201

the " Mother of God" mountain, so-called, apparently,
from the complete absence of anything lovely, feminine,
or sweet about it; certainly, savager fortresses of nature
I never beheld. Delightful, too, was our climb among
great patches of the flaky cotton-plant, over the pass of
Ober Alp, and by the shores of its lonely tarn, talking
from time to time with a handsome Swiss, who was
driving before him three goats bound to some Alp above
Andermatt for change of air, and who gave us his views
on the war, which were far from complimentary to either
France or Prussia. The furious Reuss, raging between
those huge Uri Mountains, and tearing .under the Devil's
Bridge, the misty heights above the Furka, the majestic
sweep of the Rhone Glacier, with its crowd of minarets
and domes of fantastic battlements, all cut as it were in
lapis lazuli, so deep is the blue of the ice-cataract, as it
topples over from the ridge of the great mountain, were
all new to me, though so familiar to the ordinary tourist
in Switzerland, and all unforgetable. As we whirled down
the zigzags by the edge of the great glacier I have just
mentioned, I thought of Shelley :—

" There many a precipice
Frost and the sun, in scorn of mortal power,

Have piled,—dome, pyramid, and pinnacle.

A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.

Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundary of the sky

Eolls its perpetual stream.....

Below, vast caves
Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam,

Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling,202	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

Meet in the vale, and one majestic river,

The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever
Rolls its loud waters to the ocean waves,

Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air."

A wet pilgrimage to the hospice of the Grimsel, chiefly-
associated in my mind with the lonely cry of the ptarmi-
gan,—for the deep sea of mist hid even the brink of the
precipice from view,—and a brief sojourn by the eerie
lake there,—a momentary sun-gleam on that sublime
meeting of the waters at the Handeck Falls, where a
slender, fair, and lucid column of water, 200 feet
high, called the Arlenbach, casts in its lot with the
muddy, fierce, and turbid Aar, in the very crisis of its
equally tremendous and far more desperate and violent
leap,—a wild and stormy ride on a wonderful little grey
horse, over great blocks of granite and bleak patches of
snow where there was no sign of a track, while the mist
hung low, and the wind howled, through it, back to
Obergestelen, in the valley of the Ehone,—a swift bowl-
ing along by the side of the vehement shrunken river to
Leuk, and a sharp climb up the narrow glen that leads to
Leuker-bad,—a giddy ascent on a perfect love of a mule
of the terrible mountain fastness of the Gemmi, where as
Matthew Arnold says, "the awful Alpine track crawls
up its rocky stair,"—and a long delightful day spent
in gazing at the lake of Thun, as thunderstorm after
thunderstorm swept over its surface, and the great
snow-fields of the Bliimlis Alp (or "White "Woman")
now vanished into the heart of the tempest, and now
shone out again through its parting shaderws,—these areA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

the bright points in my memory during the rest of our
journey here. And what of the dark points ? "Well,
they would be perhaps a few steamy tables d'hote, where
the jabbering and the crowd of faces sometimes quite
daze me, and I hardly know what all those grotesque
masks of unknown natures really signify, while the
heat, the din, and the gnashing of teeth become hideous
to me, and a few anxious hours about that self-willed
Edward, who walked himself quite ill on the Gemmi, in
spite of my clearly pointing out to him the duty of having
a mule, and lay in bed at Thun for a day or two after-
wards in a feverish stupor hardly able even to look at the
mountains or the lake. I was positively obliged to go
down one day to the table d'hote alone, as " lone and
lorn a creetur" as Mrs. Gummidge, and much more
helpless. Edward always tells me what the dishes mean.
I have been ever since Thun haunted by a terrible fear
that that day I partook of " brains" without knowing
it. That is a trap they are always setting for you.
And now, as Dr. Johnson said of the utility of wearing
night-caps, " I do not know, Sir; perhaps, no man shall
ever know," whether I have eaten "brains" or not.
And it is unpleasant to lose one's self-respect even hypo-
thetically. If Edward would only not indulge that silly
masculine vanity which makes men so reluctant to admit
they are not strong enough for a great fatigue, he would
not expose me to these terrible contingencies. And now
let me conclude with a few counsels to those of my
countrywomen who, while, like me, they are by no means
ambitious of getting into danger, really enjoy getting204

A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

beyond those beaten tracks where every beauty of nature
pays a high rent, and the Swiss Communes farm out their
waterfalls and glaciers to publicans, who charge the visitors
so much a head for keeping the wooden scaffoldings, and
other such facilities for " the bloated tourist," in repair.

I should say then, in the first place, take really
light luggage with you, such as a mule or one or
two " bearers" could easily carry, and travel as much
as possible by side valleys penetrated only by char-
roads, mule-tracks, and the like, but never allow your
husband or brother to take you where your luggage
cannot follow. Of course if you carry about small
wooden huts full of things, like the American ladies
in Switzerland, you must either not see anything, or
separate from your heavy baggage for weeks together,
—a most agitating thing in itself, and moreover sure to
give rise to annoyances, since you always leave what you
most want at the depot, for you might as well prepare to
take a siege train with you to the height of 10,000 feet
as boxes of that kind. Indeed, they are often too big
to get into the hotel rooms, and you see them stand-
ing in the passages, blockading the doors of the dressy
travellers, where they have frequently reminded me of
that angry cat Charles Dickens described in his Italian
journey, which he saw standing outside its hole near
Oenoa, " with such a tremendous tail that it had to wait
ten minutes to cool down before it could get in again."
Only, these peacock tails of dressy tourists never do go
•down, but remain tremendous, and a permanent hindrance
to the attainment of comfortable quarters to the last.A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	205

Still when you have really reduced your luggage to a
minimum my advice is that you should never consent to
the anguish of even a temporary parting, because it really
furnishes a " material guarantee " against what they call
" mountaineers'" passes. Do they not talk of handi-
capping strong horses by heavy weights, so as to bring
them down to the level of weaker horses ? Well, it has
been my rule to handicap Tyrolese and Swiss guides in
this way. Though timorous enough, I have always found
it quite safe to go where any Swiss or Tyrolese, with a
hundredweight or so in the basket on his back, can lead
the way, and so long as it is really safe, the less the route
is used by ordinary tourists the more of the real life of
the country you see, and the less you find of those vulgar
and adventitious " attractions" for tourists, like Bengal
lights on waterfalls and coloured frames of glass through
which to view the landscape. But whenever Edward
wishes me to part with my modest luggage on the
ground that nothing so heavy can be carried over a pass,
I have always stood firm. " Where neither a mule nor
a ' bearer' can get," I have said, " I am sure that you
and I cannot get safely. jNo ropes and steps cut in the
ice for me, thank you. Women and sedentary people
attempt these things only out of spiritual pride. They
are unbearable after they have achieved a real moun-
taineer's pass, and had almost better have perished in the
attempt, so pernicious is their subsequent moral influence
in society. They ' exalt their horns9 till they become
intolerable, even at a table d'hote." There was just such
a terrible young man at the Rhone Glacier, whose self-206	A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

righteousness for three successive days made our meals
hideous to us, though the retired chandler's daughter
opposite fell an easy victim to the love-knot which he
tied with his mountaineer's rope, and the subduing
flashes of his ice axe. There is no spiritual pride so
dangerous in its approaches, and so intolerable as that
of the amateur mountaineer. But the char-roads, mule-
paths and passes used by the country people carrying
goods from one valley to another are perfectly safe, and
if chosen with a view to scenery, are twice as delightful
as the regular tourist roads.

Next, don't suppose that rain and mist destroy the
pleasure of high passes. No doubt you miss much
scenery. Scarcely half of our eight high passes this
year were passed in bright weather; but if you are well
prepared against cold and rain, and especially if you are
on a good mule, bad weather, though it robs you of some
delight to the eye, does not diminish, if it does not even
increase, the exhilaration of mountain air. I really think
I enjoyed the wet passes the most; the sun was so hot
and glaring on the fine days. And there is a certain
grandeur and desolation in stormy weather on the moun-
tain top which adds to the imaginative charm of mountain
scenery.

Again, let me advise you to take a small stiff blotting
portfolio with you and keep a look out for rare flowers.
It is quite an object in a day's travelling, and if you
keep a good deal to the out-of-the-way roads and valleys,
you are sure to find some lovely ones, and not a few very
rare. It is a pity my dear good Edward is so shortsightedA HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.	207

and s© invincibly ignorant about flowers. He delights in
them, and lias got quite a passion for finding me new
ones,—but then his blunders! Only think, on the pass of
the Oberalp above Andermatt, he was for picking me a
fine potatoe flower, such as Frank had his first lesson on
in Miss Edgeworth's story, as something quite new and
fascinating. I asked him if we should dry it and take it
home labelled " Solanum tuberosum Alpinum," " habitat
ploughed fields and rifts of the lower Alps." Was not
that delicious? However, when I was on a mule, he
really got me a good many pretty flowers when they were
carefully pointed out to him.

Last, as to food, in the rougher valleys one or two
rules will be found useful. You must take a little etna
or " quick-boiler " (Schnell&ieder), as the Germans call it,
and buy bottles of spirit (Spiritus zum ausbrennen), which
you can get in any little Swiss, or Tyrolese, or German
town, over the size of a small village. Then, with your
own tea, you are guaranteed against the worst that fate
can do for you. Next, in all uncivilised places you may
rely much more absolutely on the eggs than in the towns.
They are sure to be pretty fresh in the wild valleys, for
there are so few that they are consumed as fast as they
are laid. We always found the eggs bad in civilised
hotels, and very fresh and sweet in village inns. Of
course they will underboil them, but you can boil them
again in the etna. As to other food it is better to
prepare a list of vetos than to demand special dishes.
Always veto egg soup. It is a loathsome German insti-
tution—the eggs swimming greasily about in it—and208

A HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL.

worse than sauerkraut. We had to veto "Nudelsuppe **
(vermicelli soup) this time—they do put such a horrid
spice in it, and the wriggling vermicelli is such an
aggravation of warm water. Then we always vetoed
ham; Germans, Tyrolese, and Swiss are alike ignorant
what ham and bacon are, though they eat so much of it.
Generally their ham is raw, and always nasty. As for
their bacon, it is gritty leather. Veal it is impossible to
veto, or it would sometimes imply a veto of all animal
food; but protest against it, and if reduced to it, denounce
" cotelettes," and tell them to bring it cut in thin slices,
very well done. But, if possible, get game. You often
can get venison, often chamois, very often roe in the
wilder parts, and not unfrequently moor cock or other
wild birds ; and game is always good. And almost
always in the Tyrol and Germany (though not in Switzer-
land) you can get very tolerable sponge cake, which they
call meal-food (Mehlsjpeise) and serve as pudding. This
is a great resource. Then the wine is always drinkable,
and the milk always good. With a judicious list of
vetoes ready on your tongue, and a great profession of
readiness to eat anything whatever not in that index
expurgatorius, you will really get on capitally in out-of-
the-way places, and not often be like your poor country-
women in Berne.

An Englishwoman in Difficulties.A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

pI.

QIR,—I know you are from of old a believer in the
value of complete change, and think a foreign holi-
day a truer holiday than any. I hold, for the most part,
the same doctrine, but it may easily be pushed beyond its
real significance. Those who go to Switzerland every
year have, after all, less complete change than those who
go abroad one year and travel at home another. Those
who travel by rail and hired carriage one year would do
well to walk or drive themselves about within a narrow
range another year. Change in the mode of change is as
important a secret of enjoyment as change itself. For my
part, I think nothing is more delightful than the complete
freedom from embarrassing external conditions which you
get on a driving tour, without a coachman or vetturino
to impose his will upon you, under the plea of consulting
for his horses' interests. Of course, if you are a good
French scholar, you might combine this plan with foreign
travel, as did the late Mr. C. A. Collins in that amusing
and delightful journey which he chronicled for us all in
"A Cruise upon Wheels." But there are not many
Englishmen except the very rich, to whom expense is
indifferent, who would feel up to the task of hiring orA HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

buying a carriage and horse in France, and undertaking
the management of their own journey under these con-
ditions. In small technical matters like the care of a
horse and carriage, a foreign language and the embarrass-
ing consciousness of being a stranger are real fetters, and
I fancy the driving-tour would, for most Englishmen, ba
more pleasantly carried out in England. Then our own
country is the only beautiful land, except France, where
one can at once get into and out of the region one goes to
see, without a tedious rail way-journey interposed at the
beginning and end of one's enjoyment,—a journey which
almost always takes four whole days out of a holiday, and
takes out a good deal more for those who are not strong*
in the way of exhaustion. Besides, it is wonderful how
little one knows of one's own country. I am a Yorkshire-
man, and have spent at least one complete holiday in
Yorkshire besides the present, since I lived there; but I
certainly know more of the Tyrol, the Canton Yaud, and
the Orisons than I do of Yorkshire. The course of the
Aar, the course of the Reuss, the course of the Inn, are
far more familiar to me than the course of the Wharfe, or
the Aire, or the Swale. Only just now, though I have
been spending my holiday in the neighbourhood of the
Wharfe, I asked myself how the Wharfe gets to the sea,
and could not answer my own question with certainty. I
guessed (rightly) that it must in all probability be
through the Ouse and the Humber, but I doubt whether
I should have felt in the same conjectural and rather d
priori condition of mind as to any stream of equal size in
Switzerland.A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.	213

However, one does not take a holiday to inform one's
self, and certainly if the Aire, for instance, were every-
where what' it is when it leaves Leeds, I should be far
from anxious to follow its foul and inky destinies. But
if you obliterate from Yorkshire every region where a
single long, smoky chimney can be seen, there are scenes
of wonderful beauty and great stretches of profound soli-
tude left. There is no moorland country in England like
it. The "cheerful silence of the fells," as Matthew
Arnold, speaking, however, of Cumbrian fells (which are
hardly so characteristic as those of Yorkshire), finely calls
it, is something quite distinct from the overpowering
stillness of mountain solitudes. You remember Miss
Bronte's description of the" scenes in " Jane Eyre," where
St. John communicates to the heroine his intended de-
parture to India, and austerely commands her to become
his wife? It is evidently a high Yorkshire moorland
which she describes, though she, who had never seen a
true mountain country, clothes her impression now and
then in language fitter for the Alps :—" f Let us rest
here/ said St. John, as we reached the first stragglers of
a battalion of rocks, guarding a sort of pass, beyond
which the beck rushed down a waterfall,—where still, a
little farther, the mountain shaking off turf and flower,
had only heath for raiment and crag for gem, where it
exaggerated the wild to the savage, and Exchanged the
fresh for the frowning-—where it guarded the forlorn
hope of solitude as a last refuge for silence. I took a
seat, St. John stood near me. He looked up the pass and
xlown the hollow ; his glance wandered away with the214	A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

stream, and returned to traverse the unclouded heaven
which coloured it. He removed his hat, let the breeze
stir his hair and kiss his'brow. He seemed in communion
with the genius of the haunt; with his eye he bade fare-
well to something. ' And I shall see it again/ he said
aloud, 'in dreams, when I sleep by the Ganges; and
again in a more remote hour, when a deeper sleep over-
comes me, on the shore of a darker stream.' Strange
words of a strange love !—an austere patriot's passion for
his fatherland!"

That strikes me as pitched a note too high. Where
heather is spread out, € savage' scenery is impossible.
The wide range of the fells and the elastic carpet of the
heather tinge the sense of solitude with a sense of freedom
and of beauty which, even under a gloomy sky, makes
the scene comparatively cheerful. You are never shut in
by a power that overawes you. You are solitary without
being lonely; it is not the power of nature, but her
liberty, that you feel. Still, Miss Bronte's description,
expresses very finely the passionate love which this kind
of scenery excites in those who are born in it. No land
scenery has so many points of resemblance to the sea a&
moorland scenery,—miles and miles of wavy ground
stretching in just such swells as are given by the motion
of the sea, but without the sense of helplessness and
danger which the sea impresses on us, and with that
cheerfulness due to growth and flower which the sea has
not, as well as much of the buoyancy which the sea has.
On the sea, and still more in the finest mountain scenery,
you are somewhat oppressed by the sense of personalA HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.	215

limits. You are made prisoner by your ship in the one
case, and by the natural barricades of rock and glacier
and precipice in the other. In a glen or on a mountain-
top you must either go up or go down, if you want to
move. But on the moorland your solitude is free. The
eye commands such ranges of open moor, that the pres-
sure of social life is more completely and visibly removed
to a distance, than on any mountain-top, but you are not
nearly so much shut in or fettered as to your course. If
at least you can walk through long heather,—no light
condition, but one which does not particularly oppress the
imagination, and this, after all, is the only point in ques-
tion, for the liability to fatigue is the real limit on human
powers,—you may launch yourself in any direction, over
a measureless stretch of glowing and fragrant bloom, to-
wards the deep blue distance, which circles the whole
horizon, without the fear of break or bound:—

" And now in front behold outspread
Those upper regions we must tread,

Mild hollows and clear heathy swells,

The cheerful silence of the fells!

Some two hours' march with serious air
Through the deep noon-tide heats we fare;

The red grouse springing at our sound
Skims now and then the shining ground;

No life save his and ours intrudes
Upon these breathless solitudes."

For breadth, freshness, and colour there is no scenery to
surpass the Yorkshire moors in August and September.

Nor is this the only great beauty of the wilder parts of
Yorkshire. In contrast with it, is the exquisite verdure216	^ HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

of the great grazing country, watered by so many rapid
streams, which mostly lies beneath the moorland. The
purple heather frames a landscape of which the interior
is generally the richest emerald, divided by a rushing
" beck,"—as the Yorkshiremen call even streams of so.
much importance to them as the Tees, the Ure, the Swale,
the Aire, and the Wharfe—a " beck " full of rapids and
shallows, crossed every mile or so by rustic stepping-
stones, which, in a rainy autumn like this, are not often
dry, and spanned every two or three miles by old stone
bridges, with deep embrasures, solidly built, but yet not
solidly enough to resist the fierce onset of the stream
when it is flooded by a great winter downfall. To me,
from my childhood, these stepping-stones have always
had a wonderful fascination, and I confess to the childish
disappointment which a rather rainy holiday has caused
me in not offering many opportunities of passing and
repassing them. Our letters ought always to have come
to us by the hand of a girl sent across these stepping-
stones from the nearest point of the postman's orbit, but
when, as the people here say, " t' beck's oop," they have,
of course, failed to come by that not very official channel,
and we have had to send for them by the nearest bridge,
or have had them conveyed to us by chance-comers, who,
perhaps, have kept them a day or two in their pockets
before remembering to deliver them. Such primitive
arrangements give in themselves a greater sense of dis-
tance from the world than any which Switzerland can
afford, and add not a little, I think, to the zest of a York-
shire holiday. But beautiful as the streams are, andA HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.	217

quaint as are the modes of communication which, in these
barely-populated districts, are kept up across them, no-
thing is so delightful to one about them as their music.
I can almost enjoy lying awake at night, that I may listen
to the nearest rapid,—a friend asserted that he could dis-
tinguish clearly the blending music of two rapids about
half a quarter of a mile from each other,—and I find it a
pleasure far greater than that caused by the fierce torrents
of Switzerland, which are usually too loud, too like a
waterfall in sound, to give the same sense of beauty and
peace. The swift but gentle streams of Yorkshire go
sliding along with a far richer and more modulated sound,
till one can hardly help whispering to one's self Words-
worth's fine lines about the Derwent, who, said the poet,
blent " his murmurs with my nurse's song : "

" And from his alder shades and rocky pools,

And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flowed along my dreams."

N0 Derwent could have had more beautiful alder-brakes,
or rocky pools, or fords, or shallows, than our favourite
Wharle, and no voice more beautiful ever flowed along
^even a poet's dreams, than his.

Such is the kind of scenery in'which I am spending my
holiday, and which I will, with your permission, describe
u little more in detail in two subsequent letters. We
have voyaged through it, my wife and I and a chosen
friend or two, in a very comfortable pony-carriage, hired
in a Yorkshire watering-place, and drawn by an old horse
of great sagacity and eminent caution, respecting the218	A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

original hiring of which, there were, on my wife's part at
all events, " great searchings of heart." I wish she had
that full confidence in me as a whip which I think my
experience and general conservatism deserve. But this is
just the sort of confidence which, whether from my short-
ness of sight or natural incapacity, I cannot breathe into
her. However, the confidence which I fail to inspire, I
think the horse himself has succeeded in inspiring,—in
no small degree however, not by virtue of his natural
caution, which is vast, but of a certain muscular defect
which, fortunately for me, puts on the outward gait of
ostentatious precautions against a slip down-hill. It
seems that there is a sort of contraction of the muscle
which makes going down-hill a special [difficulty to
horses troubled therewith, and one not to be got over
without a most exaggerated elevation of the hind-legs,
giving the air of theatrical and even burlesque prudence.
The Yorkshire hills are steep enough, and just the places
to try the nerves of any one who broods morbidly, as my
wife, I regret to say, does, over those stories of carriage
accidents of which the papers in the long vacation aro
full. But any fear of the possibility of accident in going
down-hill with our present excellent steed is not merely
out of the question, but, as it were, inconceivable. The
only fear is that he will never get to the bottom ;—he is
quick enough on the level, but, in descending, he seems to
feel morally bound not only to lift up each foot two feet
at least from the ground, but at every step to give any one
walking by his side a distinct view of each shoe and ample-
opportunities of examining it, to see that no stone is in it>A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

and that every nail is still tight. This morbid peculiarity
so closely imitates the bearing of the highest prudential
spirit, as to be a perpetual guarantee of safety to my wife,
and therefore ease to myself, in the course of the brief but
pleasant wanderings which, in my other letters, I will
shortly describe.

I am, Sir, &c.,

A Yorkshireman.II.

O IE,—The valley of the "Wharfe, in the neighbourhood
of Barden Tower, has every beauty that Yorkshire can
provide, but has two disqualifications for travellers,—that
it has no inns, and that the meal of dinner is steadily dis-
couraged within its precincts. From Bolton Bridge, where
there is an inn of high pretensions, the Devonshire Arms,
but one only too populous with tourists visiting the famous
Abbey for my taste, as far as Burnsall, six miles farther
up the valley, there is no shelter for the bond fide traveller;
but that difficulty may be got over by persuading some of
the jolly Yorkshire farmers to let you a lodging for a
week or two, which, for a reasonable consideration, they
are generally willing enough to do. But when you come
to the farther question of dinner, there is a difficulty.
Bacon and eggs there are in plenty, but that, beyond a
certain limit, is bilious diet. There is a butcher who
lives in a most romantic situation under the picturesque
rocks of Barden Fell, but when "t* beck's oop" and the
stepping-stones invisible, his visits are few and far
between. Even when we have driven to Skipton-in-
Craven or to Grassington for meat, we have generally
returned without it, discouraged by the unsavoury odds4 HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.	22r

and ends of bones which alone inhabited those ogreish-
looking, trellised coops appropriated in this neighbourhood
to butchers. I shall never forget a dismal day on which
we drove to Grassington in search of meat. Grassington
was our post-town, but a post-town little known ap-
parently in. Yorkshire, for one letter sent there " tried "
Bedale (what incoherent Post-Office functionary, I wonder,
suggested the &ying of Bedale? he might just as well
have said, " Try Jericho ") and two or three other places,
before, on, the fourth after the right day, it reached us.
It is a grass-grown place, situated on a lovely bend of the
Wharfe, with one lively, bustling shop in it, and for the
rest, rather mouldy retreats dimly haunted by people who
seem to have no share in the stirring blood of thriving
Yorkshire. When I saw the ostler coming out to take
Old Caution," as we call our horse, who had breasted
the driving Scotch mist with steady zeal to reach Gras-
sington, I could not help murmuring to myself Tenny-
son's graphic salutation—

" Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin,

Here is custom come your way;

Take my brute and lead him in,

Stuff his ribs with mouldy hay,"

—only that I could never have spoken so disrespectfully of
the horse himself! However, I fear his ribs were stuffed
with "mouldy hay," and when I consulted the pre-
historic functionary who performed that service for him
about meat,—it went against the grain even to mention
the subject to him,—he beckoned furtively to me, and
took me over the way, to a desolate and unsavoury cage,222	A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

which looked, and also affected our other senses, so
awfully like the Morgue, that when he offered to fetch an
official to open it, my party with one consent cried out
that eggs and bacon for the rest of our natural lives
would be preferable to anything that had even entered
such a receptacle as that. Skipton is an active place, and
I do not say its butchers' shops were quite of so dis-
tressing a description. Still, meat was its weak point.
In an injudicious moment we bought some mutton
sausages there, which subsequently lay very heavy, partly
on our stomachs and more on our imaginations. And a
joint of beef which we ordered thence, our good hostess
kindly took off our hands. I grieved for those who con-
sumed it. It was very black. The cry everywhere in
Yorkshire villages has been, "Beef! ye'll get none beef."
I wonder why. However, our worthy neighbour across
the river generally gave us a joint a week of good mutton
or lamb, and by much husbanding and hashing that has
supplied the tissues well enough, and the scenery has
done the rest.

And what scenery it has been ! Bolton, with its dark,
picturesque woods, its stately ruin, its rich, green lawns
and pastures, its winding, rushing river, the boiling
waters of its Strid, and the silver spray of its mimic
Staubbach, descending to the Wharfe over a steep, grey
rock exactly facing the old Priory, has been almost the
least of our delights; for I confess that the " bloated
tourist" is one of our horrors; and the "tourist," both
bloated and unbloated,—not only the tourist with the
everlasting grey suit, and white handkerchief streamingA HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

over his neck, but the rudimentary, shopkeeping tourist,
whose little son blows triumphantly a tin trumpet, and
whose daughters divide sticky gingerbread at all the
moments of true ecstasy,—is in immense force at Bolton,
lapped in gorgeous carriages, and crowded into vulgar
vans. But though the least of our delights, even Bolton
has been a real delight. I know no ruin which pro-
duces less of the sadder impressions of ruin than Bolton.
A friend deeply versed in history who went with me
on one occasion there, said somewhat heartlessly, " How
much grander it is so, than it can ever have been when
the fat monks had it all to themselves! " I suggested
that their " fatness" was not altogether matter of
history, at least—for I dreaded austere historic refutation
—as regarded the whole period of Bolton Abbey's great-
ness; and that abroad, unquestionably, I had visited
Abbeys still in possession of monks who were not only
not fat, but who answered perfectly to Matthew Arnold's
fine description of the inhabitants of the Grande
Chartreuse :—

" The silent courts where night and day
Into their stone-carved basin cold
The splashing, icy fountains play;

The humid corridors behold,

Where ghostlike in the deepening night
Cowl'd forms brush by in gleaming white;

44 The chapel where no organ's peal
Invests the stern and naked prayer.

With penitential cries they kneel

And wrestle; rising, then with bare
And white uplifted faces stand,

Passing the Host from hand to hand."224	A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

It was of no avail. My historian insisted that, aestheti-
cally speaking, at all events, the final cause of Bolton
Priory was not its use, while it had inhabitants, but its
beauty after it had ceased to have them; and there is a
good deal to be said for his view. At all events, in these
days of vague and shadowy spiritual feeling, I am afraid
that more such feeling is produced in this

4 4 pile of State,

Overthrown and desolate,"

where the unroofed, ivy-covered arches, standing out
against the blue sky, recall all that is venerable, and
nothing that is false, in the worship of the past,—than in
the part which is still devoted to the uses of a church.
But what may be the exact value of such vague devotional
feelings I will not pretend to say. If Professor Tyndall
is right in regarding religion as the province of the
" creative " faculties of men, as distinguished from the
knowing faculties, these vague tentatives of emotion con-
stitute the only proper worship. But I should suppose
that the last region of thought in which we can have
anything to do with " creation " is the sphere of religion.
Still, though I cannot help thinking we are in a bad way
when a church in decay fills us with truer religious
feeling than a church in the energy of its life, it is true
beyond all question that one would hardly dream of
wishing Bolton's " mouldering priory " intact again, at
the cost of losing the blue sky above the great eastern
window, the murmur of the rapid Wharfe, the silver mist
of the waterfall, the rich green of the meadows, and theA HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.	225

deep black shadows of the woods, even though, the eye
were once more able to enjoy rich streams of painted light
on the pavements of the nave and aisles, and the ear to
vibrate to the grandest masses of Mozart or Beethoven.

And yet Bolton, as I said just now, has been really the
least part of our enjoyment. We, like the good Lord
Clifford, the Shepherd Lord, have been—

'4 Most happy in the shy recess
Of Barden's lowly quietness,"

or visiting the purple moors and lovely little glens about.
There is one famous glen between Bolton and Barden,
almost under Beamsley Beacon, wThich is called in the
neighbourhood "the Yalley of Desolation," the reason
being, no doubt, the number of blasted and lightning-
struck trees which stand on the sides of the glen. The
name, however, was more appropriate formerly than it is
now. A few weird old skeletons still stretch out their
haggard arms over the glen, but a good deal of fine young
timber is growing up and hiding them, and but for them
the glen would be positively cosy. A lovely little stream,
full of mossy islands, rushes down it to the Bolton woods,
where it ultimately joins the Wharfe, making two beau-
tiful waterfalls in its upper course. On the head of the
picturesque rock down the face of which the first and
most striking of these waterfalls dashes, a green sturdy
young oak stands fast against the deep blue sky, not.
appearing to dread the fate of its blasted neighbours,
but as if planted on purpose to illustrate Thomson'a
assertion that—

Q226	A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

" the loud blast that rends the skies
Serves but to root thy native oak."

And at the foot of the waterfall, a tall foxglove that had
just reached the top of its spire of flowers made a rich
contrast to the dashing spray. It was a scene to bring
back Scott's picture in the " Monastery " of the glen in
which Halbert Glendinning used to summon the White
Maid of Avenel to his aid, though it was a fountain, and
not a waterfall, which gave life to the solitude of that
" fell," and a holly instead of an oak which hung over
the water.

And still more delightful have been our rambles on
Burnsall and Barden Fells, which face each other from
•each side of the racing and bending Wharfe, and on
Halton Fell, by which climbs the wild road out of the
Talley of the Wharfe to Embsay (where the monks first
dwelt who subsequently migrated to Bolton), and thence
to the valley of the Aire, and Skipton. On this last way,
especially while the heather was at its richest glow, the
views on both sides were as wonderful as any England can
show. Westwards—that is, towards Embsay, Skipton,
and Ingleborough—the rocks above us were themselves
most picturesque and rugged, while lines of fells curving
into each other, and ridge behind ridge of lofty hills,
marked where the Western Highlands of Yorkshire and
the Eastern of Lancashire met. Eastwards—that is,
looking back towards Barden—we had a perfect amphi-
theatre of moorland, brilliant with every shade of heather,
from the darkest "ling" to the brightest purple heath ;
ivhile the dry fern which was mixed in great abundanceA HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.	227

with it, gave that salt odour to the wind which half per-
suaded one that banks of seaweed, and consequently the
ocean itself, was close at hand. Barden Fell, the finest
and ruggedest of all the various moors and fells, and the
richest in its purple tints, crowned with some huge
boulders,—called in some maps " Simon's," and in others
■" the Earl's," seat,—fronts you full as you return, and to
the left of it stretches away northwards a dim blue
distance, where the moors drop lower towards Bedale and
Richmond.

Such is the country in which the first part of our holi-
day has been spent, not altogether without difficulties.
First, there was the heavy rain, in which we drove so
pertinaciously that the neighbouring farmers thought us
daft. Then there was the narrowness of the roads, and
the great length of our horse and trap, which must have
measured some sixteen feet in length at least, from the
nose of the horse to the back of the carriage, a circum-
stance which, added to an ancient creed of my wife's as to
the absolute necessity of a broad space to turn in, caused
in these narrow hill-side roads quite a little sensation-
scene whenever turning was proposed. Then there was a
further element of sensation in two pet dogs> generally
allowed to run in a leash by the side of the carriage
whenever our prudent horse did not step out too fast (the
leash being provided to keep them from the moors, where
the grouse are very strictly preserved), but who were
liable to be hauled in, just as an anchor is weighed, on
the slightest appearance of danger, and who barked so
loud on these occasions as to drown consultation and lend228	A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

despair to remonstrance. Add to this that my wife carried
a vote of want of confidence in me at every steep descent,
and emerged with her dogs to walk, and that it is a
country of bulls, and bellowing bulls, accustomed,—so
the terrified imagination of the district asserts,—to leap
high walls, and that the barking of dogs is supposed by
the feminine imagination to exert a strong magnetic
attraction on the ferocity of bulls, and you will see that
there were elements of agitation as well as tranquillity in
our daily life. On these occasions I cannot say that I
was always imperturbable. The lady who was .most
frequently our companion, and whose Yorkshire humour
is keen and trenchant, gives most amusing accounts of
some of these scenes, which she illustrates in a provoking
way from the history of my childhood,—it is a terrible
pull over a man to have known him when a child, and to
be able to discourse ad libitum on the theme that the
child is father of the man,—affirming that even then
a scene of boyish turbulence exercised a sort of frenzying
fascination on me, till it drew me into the hurly-burly
with a wild hoo-roosh. But I mention these trifling
matters in order to illustrate the fine character and im-
perturbable presence of mind of our many - counselled
horse. On one occasion I had put him up at a farm
where there was no man to attend to him, and had done
the unharnessing myself. When I came to harness him
again, I carefully refastened what I had undone; but
harnessing is not my forte, and I did not observe that
some person had in the interval taken off the crupper,
and so loosened the saddle, and that the collar had gotA HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.	229

pushed forwards on his neck. Then, incautiously adopt-
ing a counsel of my wife's, I had attempted to wheel the
carriage out of the yard before putting the horse into the
traces ; but the carriage was too heavy for me, and even
with heated female assistance I only just succeeded in
turning it down-hill, which was the wrong direction.
The dogs were barking frantically. The long vehicle had
to be turned in a narrow road, in a paroxysm of panic on
the part of one person and of fever on the other, and in
the nick of time came a succession of wood-carts laden
with far - protruding trunks of trees, and driven by
children of twelve. My wife was in an agony, I was in a
fume. Our friend was not altogether easy, though she
was mentally taking notes and preparing to satirise.
When we had passed the string of wood-carts in safety,
the extraordinary discovery of the state of the harness,
which was all gravitating towards " Old Caution's " neck,
was suddenly discovered while going down the steepest
hill in the neighbourhood. My wife descended with her
dogs, caught one under each arm, and declined again to
return to the vehicle. Tumult reigned in my blood.

But Athens had a commander equal to the emergency
in Miltiades, the son of Cimon." Our horse was imper-
turbable. He paced down the dangerous hill, lifting his
feet at least twelve inches higher than usual, in spite of
frightful pressure from the kicking-strap, which had
rucked nearly up to the top of his back. Feeling that an
appeal was made to his presence of mind, he completely
disregarded the accumulation of miscellaneous pressures
on his neck, and carried us home in safety, though our23o	A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

worthy host held up his hands and turned up his eyes in
astonishment at the jumble of leathern paraphernalia
muddled together on the old fellow's shoulders, as we
finally descended the steep and narrow incline which led
to our farm. But that excellent farmer did not know
how by bad Yorkshire roads our horse's heart was
trained,—

44 How he, long taught in humble walks to go,
Was softened into feeling, soothed and tamed."

Even my wife regretted she had not trusted him. In her
haste she fell over her little dogs, and they and she were
the only ones who suffered, even in any degree, by the
misadventure. Distrust in that horse in future would be
a sin. Even she feels it. A Ulysses amongst horses,
arrange his trials how you will, he thoroughly knows
himself, even when he most wonders at the vagaries of
his human masters,—and knows too, " himself not least,,
and honoured of them all."—I am, Sir, &c.,

A Yorkshireman.III.

OIR,—There is no county in England where the people
stand higher in their own esteem than in Yorkshire,
and though their self-complacency is exaggerated, and is
the mark of a certain positiveness in their nature which
always goes with hard limits, they are unquestionably
a people of grit and great aplomb. But softness of
speech is not their foible. A friend asked a farmer in the
neighbourhood, who had been married just a fortnight to
a handsome, careworn young woman of thirty, if he did
not find himself very happy in his new condition; on
which he replied—-in his wife's presence, I believe—" he
was main comfortable before he married, and he did not
know he was much more so now." When a party from
one of the Duke of Devonshire's gamekeepers entered a
little moorland farm to look after some rabbits, the
farmer's wife, with her arms akimbo, and regarding them
apparently with a purely speculative interest, remarked,
without any sign of irritation, " You seem but a foul lot,"
and when asked " Why, mistress ? what is there foul about
us?" she looked steadily at the group, vouchsafed no
answer, and re-entered her cottage. Yet there is one side
on which there is no hardness or want of apprehensiveness232	A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

in the Yorkshire people; they seem greatly impressed by
their own scenery. It is almost the only county in which
I find the natives' opinion as to what it is worth while to
see, a safe one. If you ask their advice, they do not send
you (like so many other country people) to newly-built
houses, with grand, formal gardens, but to wild moors
and lonely mountain roads. Ho doubt we did meet with
one farmer, a man very proud of his own lofty-raftered
" house-place/' who expressed his surprise at the fancy of
his guests for visiting a certain inn at the foot of one of
the finest moorland scenes in Yorkshire, remarking calmly,
" I see none so much in't—I can touch t' kitchen-ceiling
with my fingers;" but in the general way, I found no
advice better than that of the farmers themselves as to the
relative interest of the walks and drives. And, probably,
it is another proof of their sensitiveness to the influences
of scenery, that the sometimes gloomy insularity of the
English character is seen in its wildest form in Yorkshire.
We were more than once reminded by men's faces and
manners of that most powerful and eerie, most imaginative
and most gloomy of all English stories, in which the
despair of proud and selfish passion, and of dumb, wild
yearning after the past, are expressed with a fierce and
terrifying force —" Wuthering Heights," by Emily
Bronte. In one of our little journeys, on the top of a
high and lonely moor, we found ourselves uncertain of
our way just as we reached a farm, that might have been
Wuthering Heights itself, so far was it from all human
habitation. My wife knocked to ask the way at the
house, while I remained in the trap. It was long before

IA HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.	233

any one answered her.1 At last, a lame man with a
strange desolate face came limping out of an outhouse,
and gave her brief, terse directions. After he had re-
tired, she found that one of the dog's collars was broken
and had dropped, and she wanted the man's help to find
it. After much knocking, he reappeared on the scene,
discovering, as he opened the door, a wild confusion in the
house, the stairs all littered with clothes, as though there
had been a violent struggle, but no one except himself
apparently was within; when told what my wife wanted,
he said, almost ferociously, "I've seen nout on't," and
re-entered the house, slamming and immediately locking
the door after him, with a most repellant decisiveness of
inhospitality that was almost worthy of the savage hero
of ""Wuthering Heights," Heathcliff, himself. Certainly
the wilder Yorkshire solitudes are apt to nourish a melan-
choly sort of savagery which dreads the remedy—human
society—even more than it dreads the brooding and
imaginative state of nerve which constitutes the disease.
Mr. Wordsworth had a great admiration for the influence
of solitude:—

" No mate, no comrade Lucy knew,

She dwelt on a wild moor;

The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door."

But I think Emily Bronte's description of the effect of
dwelling " on a wild moor," " without mate or comrade,"
is truer to the actual experience of Yorkshire life. In
many different moorland districts we were struck, both in
women and in men, with the dreary, sombre, and wistful234

A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

expression of faces that seemed to have watched the purple*
thunderclouds float over the deeper purple of the moor-
lands, till they were quite unfitted for entering into the
quick and rapid ripples of human interests, and had
caught something of the monotonous tint of the rain and
mist of the great moorland sea. Miss Bronte herself
must have felt this. She speaks of the moors as not un-
frequently " livid,'' and there is a shiver of dread in her
description of her sister Emily's passion for them. Per-
haps they are better as occasional friends, than as constant
companions and intimates.

We have had a delightful journey with our much-
experienced horse from the "Western moorland tract of
Yorkshire to the Eastern, for which purpose we had to
cross the great intervening plain which is the land of corn,
and fruit, and succulent roots. Some friends whom we
wished to see were staying in the neighbourhood of
Helmsley, in scenery at once the most various and rich in
Yorkshire; but instead of driving direct thither, we
determined to direct our way by Kettlewell, over the
range of hills which divides Wharfedale from the valley
of the Ure and Swale, to Middleham, and thence to cross
the great plain to Thirsk. A little beyond Thirsk, the
ascent of the Hambledon Hills begins, and after passing
them you descend into the lovely valley of the Eye, and
■upon the fair ruin of Rievaulx. The journey is not only
full of charming scenery, first wild, then rich, then tame,
and finally romantic, but it is fascinating from the curious
vividness with which it impresses on the eye what the
geologists assert, that in crossing the plain you are drivingA HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.	235

over what was the bottom of the sea, at a time when the
"Western Highlands of Yorkshire rose out of it in steep
and towering cliffs at one side, and the Eastern Highlands
in similar cliffs on the other. For a time, after we had
out off our communications with the Barden valley, we
drove westwards and then north to Kilnsey Crag and
Kettlewell. Kilnsey Crag is a long, insulated inland lime-
stone cliff, extending for about half a mile, and standing
up as sheer out of the great plain as do the cliffs of Dover
from the sea. After two days more driving, for the
greater part of which we had been tending eastwards,
we came to just such another cliff, facing it, at a distance
of perhaps forty miles under the Hambledon Hills, called
Whitestone; and between Kilnsey and Whitestone there
must some time have washed a sea like that between
Dover and Boulogne, though the straits must have been
wider, Kilnsey marking the shores on the west side of the
great sea loch, and Whitestone that on the east. From
Kilnsey, following the Wharfe upwards to Kettlewell, we
became entangled in the mountain regions which must
have stood above the waters even when Middleham, and
Bedale, and Masham, and Ripon were still oyster-beds or
banks of seaweed. Kettlewell, where we slept the first
night, was one of the most characteristic of the Yorkshire
hamlets, and reminded us strongly of a descriptive verse
in " Peter Bell, the Potter " :—

" And he had trudged through Yorkshire dales,

Amongst the rocks and winding scars,

Where deep and low the hamlets lie,

Beneath their little patch of sky
And little lot of stars."236	A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

Amongst the cosiest of such, hamlets is Kettlewell, lying
at the foot of Great "Wernside and Bukden Pike, which
loom big above you, while the infant Wharfe rushes below
the village. A clear, open stream runs down the chief
street, while steep roads climb ambitiously out of it
towards the great hills beyond. The name seemed to
promise comfort rather than beauty, and a mighty joint
of excellent beef—beef such as we had not tasted for
weeks—gigantic pasties, rich cream, and piles of oat-cake,
fulfilled the promise of the name. But, alas! even in
Kettlewell there was an alloy. There were sheep there
feeding on coarse rich herbage beside the village stream,
and feeding evidently too eagerly for their peace of
stomach. All night long two of them bleated their tales
of indigestion into our ears, and overpowered the murmur
of the brook with the vain detail of their uneasy symptoms.
Soon after leaving Kettlewell, we left behind us the valley
of the Wharfe, and went up into the mists lying on the
wild hills of Bishopdale, from which a torrent tumbles
down sloping crags. I remember lunching in a quaint
village called West Burton, built round a green, where,
set up on a cross, is a cock adorned with all manner of
ribbons, which the village boys yearly renew; but whether
it is St. Peter's cock, and dressed out for its services in
reminding him of his broken faith, or what the ribbons
symbolize, I could not find out. Many of the strange
little houses have their stables on the ground-floor, and a
flight of stone steps leading up to the rooms where the
villagers live on the first-floor. West Burton is a very
quaint siding into which Yorkshire life is shunted so asA HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.	237

to hear but little of tlie big world outside. Then we had
a glorious drive to Middleham, over a grand moor, where
the road climbed near to the very summit of the ridge,
leaving fir-woods beneath it, and running parallel with a
blaze of glowing heather above. Far and wide stretched
the blue plain, and we met not a soul on the way but
a forlorn shepherd boy, who was in search of missing
sheep, and who came just in time to assure us that we
were quite in the right way, though all traces of a beaten
road had disappeared in a grassy strip of land between
two walls. So steep was the way, that my wife, in her
sympathy with poor " Old Caution's " troubles, frequently
pushed behind the carriage, producing, I think, about as
much effect as the compassionate fly who thought he had
helped the carter to get his wheels out of the rut. Weary
enough we were when we turned off the mountain-side
and descended upon inhospitable Middleham—a large,
cheerful market-town, with seven considerable inns and
no accommodation. Every inn repulsed us with loss. A
company of organ-builders filled one; shooting-parties
occupied another; commercial travellers a third; horse-
trainers a fourth, and so on. At last, utterly weary, and
in anxiety as to " Old Caution's " much-tried powers, we
got a private house to receive us, on condition that the
horse and carriage were put up at an inn; but even so,,
though our good old friend got food and shelter, we got
shelter, but little food. A steak, we were assured, was the
wildest of dreams; a chop was possible, but in the existing^
condition of Middleham, was not to be achieved. Tea
(diluted), bacon (greasy), and eggs (half-done), were our238	A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

only resources; and such, was the meal upon which we
went to see the ruin of the famous castle, dear to
Richard III., and where Edward IY. was confined by
Warwick. The old gentleman who showed us over it
interested us at least as much as the castle. He was
eighty years of age, held the position of town-crier, and
was enthusiastic for the family who built the first part of
the castle (the FitzRanulphs, whom he uniformly called
"FitzRandalls"), and for the present owner, or rather
for one of his sons—the first yearnings of whose bowels of
tenderness towards the old ruin (betrayed now thirty
years ago), the old man repeatedly commemorated in the
words, " When t' young gentleman first took a fancy to
the plaace;" but for all intervening potentates between
the FitzRanulphs and " t' young gentleman " who ap-
pointed him to his position of trust, he showed supreme
contempt. On the Nevilles, who built the later parts of
the castle, he looked down with ineffable scorn. He
evidently conceived that the FitzRanulphs were historic;
that "t* young gentleman," himself, and the late Miss
Agnes Strickland (who had once visited the castle, and
praised him as the best of guides, interpreters, and com-
mentators), were the representatives of modern thought
unwinding the scroll of history; but that the Nevilles
and such like personages were neither fish, flesh, nor
fowl.

From inhospitable Middleham, where we hardly obtained
•either fish, flesh, or fowl, we drove across the great "plain
by Bedale to Thirsk—a country of yellow sheaves and
mighty waggons—and then entered on the romanticA HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.	239

country beyond Whitestone Cliff and the Hambledon
Hills—a country in which we found richly-wooded glens
meeting from every side, ruined abbeys and castles adding
their picturesque effects to those of wild downs, yellow
stubble, or cornfields, and forests of fir; and, framing the
wide horizon, a circle of purple moor. One lovely day we
spent with a large and delightful party, in the most
lucid atmosphere I ever saw, on Helmsley Moor itself—
whence the eye catches the light sea-line beyond Whitby
and Filey, a line broken here and there by dark purple
ridges of still higher moorland. By moonlight we walked
over to Rievaulx, and heard the screech-owls screaming
their best at us all the way; and next day turned our
horse's head westward again, towards Ripon and Barden.
The clouds had gathered once more. When we got to the
top of the Hambledon Hills, the most thunderous sky
I ever saw—though little came of it—scowled down upon
us, and the coldest of winds made us appreciate the name
given to a village we had just passed, called Cold Kirkby.
The road, as Yorkshire roads will, ended in a most im-
partial common, without any sign of a definite track, and
we gave ourselves up as doomed to face a hurricane, with
not even so much to guide us as a forlorn sheep-track.
But the prospect soon changed—the "ragged rims of
thunder brooding low and shadow streaks of rain " gra-
dually faded away; a fair mountain road succeeded to the
impartial common, and as we went down the pass towards
Lower Kilburn, a glorious stretch of plain, bathed in the
rich blue mists which soften without concealing, came out
beneath the bright moorland of the mountain-side. It was24o	A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.

like Bubens's great landscape in the National Gallery, but
set in a richer framework of sun and sky. As " Old
Caution" picked his way very carefully down the pass,,
and left the Hambledon Hills again behind him, we found
it difficult to say whether the Eastern or Western High-
lands of Yorkshire were the most impressive. The former
have the advantage in beauty and variety of form and.
colour; the latter in wild and solitary freedom. I had
intended to say something also of our drive to Malham,,
where the Aire starts out of a limestone cliff, without
visible opening, as if from the rock that Moses struck,,
and where a little amphitheatre of cliffs stands round tho
spot, like the cirques of the Pyrenees and the Fer-a-Cheval
of Sixt. But all things must come to an end, and the
beauties of Yorkshire, like other divine works, are "exceed-
ing broad," In spite of canine, and taurine, and equine
terrors, it is long since we had a truer rest. Yorkshire-
has been to us what it was to the truest of its devotees—

" A little and a lone green lane

That opened on a common wide ;

A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain
Of mountains circling every side.

" A heaven so clear, an earth so calm.

So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air;

And, deepening still the dream-like charm,

Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere."

That is the abiding picture which one recalls when one-
recalls those Yorkshire hills and heaths; and it cannot
but be dear to any one who can truly sign himself—

A YORKSHIREMAN-STJMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

RI.

OIR,—In an article published on the 10th of April last,
which was calculated to attract attention from all
the large number of people who are beginning to find the
art of successful holiday-making one of daily increasing
difficulty, and which you headed, "How to Enjoy a
Short Holiday," you advised your readers to try driving
about England in a pony-carriage. For my own part, I
did not pay very much attention to the advice; for,
knowing something of the public Press, it occurred to
me that the advice was as much due to the necessity of
finding a good leading idea for an article, for the con-
struction of which your contributor's own recent ex-
perience had just furnished him with some materials, as
to any careful comparison of the enjoyability of different
modes of travelling, and any fixed preference for one of
them. But my wife, who has naturally a good deal of
influence over the mode in which we spend our brief
intervals of enjoyment, was greatly struck by your
counsel, the more, perhaps, that she has taken lately a
strong aversion to the crowded tables d'hote of Switzer-
land, and the long railway journeys which are necessary
to carry you to that land of tourists. She immediatelyA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

made up her mind that our summer holiday should not
be continental, but English; and she speedily began to
make the preliminary arrangements. A month or two
ago we had no very available horse for such a holiday
trip, but only two ponies—one a willing and pretty
creature, with two good legs, a third tolerable leg though
a little spavined, and the fourth completely lame ; and
the other perfectly sound and very pretty, but obstinately
bent on restricting her exertions to an hour and a half a*
day, travelled at the rate of four miles an hour at most,
and who regarded heavy strokes with a rather formidable
whip as weighing nothing substantial against the more
solid reasons which determined her to this resolve,
Now, clearly a driving-tour with either of these qua-
drupeds was out of the question. So, not without many
searchings of heart on my wife's part—for she justly
observed that, though the last-mentioned pony was not
much in a carriage, she was delightful to pet in the
Stable-—I was induced to send this pretty little sluggard
back to her native hills, to turn out the lame one to grass
for a couple of months, and to purchase a new horse for
the intended tour. My wife had long had her eye on a
neighbouring grocer's horse. "Edward," she said to
me, " tradesmen's horses are always safer to buy than
others ; they have less 4 blood,' and consequently sounder-
nerves. Besides, they have got into good habits of
standing well at the customers' doors. I cannot bear
a horse that fidgets about when I want it to stand still.
Then, as a rule, tradesmen are cautious persons. Butchers*
boys, it is true, do drive their carts at a breakneck pace ;A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.	245

but butchers' boys are not tradesmen. Our good grocer
has an admirable white mare, which is both strong and
steady. She cannot be less than ten years old, which is
a great guarantee for steady habits. Make "Watson an
offer for it. I have the greatest confidence in him. He
is a family man, and drives his wife and children about
with that mare, and he would never do an imprudent
thing. If he will sell you the mare, I shall be comfort-
able during our drive, and both my dogs can go with us.
If you go to a dealer, he'll sell you an old hunter which
will bolt the first time dear little Billy barks, and go lame
the second day. But buy Watson's mare, and we shall
be able to carry out the programme of that excellent
writer in the Spectator without fear or danger." I re-
marked that the mare was too tall for our very low pony-
carriage ; and I knew well that nothing would induce my
wife to change her pony-carriage, which is close to the
ground, for any vehicle in falling from which the accele-
Tating force of gravity would have more time to act in ;
but she overruled the objection. She had found out from
the local carriage-maker that the shafts could be raised by
iron stanchions so as to fit the pony-carriage for an
Ordinary-sized mare, and so it was. Watson named a
tolerably high price for a mare at least ten years old,
•especially as there were suspicious marks of a cut on one
knee, which pointed to an accident of some kind—it was
said to have been due to striking violently against an iron
rail in a jump—but, still, beggars must not be choosers,
^and as it was my proposal, and not his, that the mare
-should pass into my hands, I paid the price, and we246	A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

started for our tour in Hampshire, Dorsetshire, and per-
haps Devonshire. Will you allow me to give you a little-
account of an experiment suggested by yourself, and
carried out in conformity with your counsels ?

You, Sir, had recommended that the start should not
"be made from too near town, so I put the mare and trap
on a railway, to secure that we should begin our drive in
a quiet and pretty country. And here I would advise
those gentlemen who don't take grooms with them to
look after their carriage and horse, to avoid railway opera-
tions as much as possible. First of all it takes about
three-quarters of an hour at each end of the line to get
the horse-box and truck on or off. Again, the porters are
very awkward in the operation of getting a horse—even
a quiet tradesman's mare of a certain age—into a box.
They stand round her in a crowd, under the impression
probably that social sympathy will stimulate the efforts
of the porter whose duty it is to urge her up the wooden
inclined plane, which horses seem to dislike even more
than I used to dislike those problems concerning con-
strained motion up inclined planes which constituted the
academic tortures of my youth; arid you get very hot in
watching their vague cries and fruitless efforts, and every
minute expect one of them to get a disabling kick which
will give him a claim on your compassion for life. Then,,
if you have to pass a junction between two distinct com-
panies' lines, as I had, you may be quite sure that the
second company will entirely decline to take on your
horse-box and truck in time for the train you have deter-
mined to catch, and this even though you give themA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.	247

three-quarters of an hour to effect a transfer. Instead of
meeting your wish, they will probably isolate your un-
fortunate horse-box and trap in a sort of desolate Sahara
of converging rails and tramways, far from any platform
or terra firma of any kind, and blandly inform you that
your property is quite safe there, and will be coupled not
on to the train which is now starting—that is impossible
—but on to one which is to start two hours later, and
that, if you like to go on yourself at once, it shall be duly
sent after you later in the day. You look ruefully at
the distant island of horse-box, and are quite helpless.
Now, all this is very painful to a man who has laid his
plans neatly beforehand, and knows where he intended
to sleep, and does not know where he can sleep if he
starts on his drive at about six in the evening, and if the
railway station at which he leaves the train has no
eligible inns. I afterwards found other evil results from
the railway journey for the trap and horse, but these I
will not anticipate. Suffice it to say that we disembarked
from our train much too late to reach "Winchester that
evening, and were fortunate in finding a sufficiently com-
fortable inn at a Hampshire village called Popham Lane
—an inn deep in the shade of stately elms—where a
lone, lorn woman admitted us under a sort of protest,
stating that all the attendants of the inn were out for
a holiday, and that she doubted whether she could feed
us adequately. (It is a curious fact, by the way, of which
I have now had some experience, that modern English
innkeepers, instead of welcoming guests, frequently sus-
pend their judgments in a most distressing way for a24B a summer driving-tour.

quarter of an hour at least on the subject of their admis-
sibility ; and even if they do admit them, appear to look
upon them as a grievance, especially if they wish to stay
the night. And as the charges in such cases are never
low, and the profits must be high, the phenomenon some-
what puzzles me.) However, we had, on the whole, a
prosperous journey both to Popham Lane and Winchester,
in which last place we spent a day very pleasantly. The
stately nave of the beautiful Cathedral, the quaint pre-
cincts of that most cosy of Cathedral closes, the pretty
river, and the picturesque hills round the city, would
have delighted us, even if we had not been already so
familiar in imagination with Barchester, that to make its
acquaintance for the first time was like the first meeting
with a literary friend. I went to the evening service—
my wife did not, for she said it would be cruel to leave
the dogs alone in an inn—and fancied I could see the
Rev. Septimus Harding—that best and most delicate of
all Mr. Trollope's creations, and the only one which
reveals in him a certain store of poetic feeling—creeping
across the Cathedral close in his white surplice for the
last time, and then encountering that "failure in the
slight clerical task allotted to him" which resulted in
his abandoning his clerical duty in the Cathedral, and
putting off his dearly-loved garment for ever. Later,
by the evening light, we walked along the bank of the
Itchen to " Hiram's Hospital," as Mr. Trollope calls the
beautiful Hospital of St* Cross, and were shown over it
by Skulpit, or Bunce, or whichever of the old Bedesmen
it may have been who was deputed to this duty. TheA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.,	249

night was falling fast as we traversed the picturesque
cloisters and went ,out again under the venerable gateway
of St. Cross, but, though a shower was coming down
from the neighbouring hills, and the beauty of the scene
was dimmed, we could not help discussing how it is that
Mr. Trollope's piercing eye has never shown any of that
delicacy of appreciation for natural scenery which it has
shown for all the shades of qualities displayed by men.
For the walk from Winchester to St. Cross is one of true,
though quiet, loveliness; one Mr. Harding must have
loved as dearly as he loved the Cathedral chant or the
sweet tones of his own violin. Soft meadows watered by
the Itchen, with swelling, beech-covered hills rising all
round, the great grey Cathedral for the central object,
and St. Cross, with its ancient and most picturesque
tower, and its groves hiding the somewhat squalid village
from the walker's sight—these make a picture such as
"Winchester boys must treasure long in their memory,
even though they go from Winchester to Oxford, and
merge the remembrance of the charming scenery of the
Itchen, as Matthew Arnold seems to have done, in the
soft and gracious neighbourhood of the loveliest of
English cities. Yet surely a school-time passed in the
neighbourhood of Winchester must be as good a pre-
paration for entering into the charm of the neighbour-
hood of Oxford, as familiarity with the stately old build-
ings of Winchester is for entering into the fascinations of
the Oxford colleges. It seemed to us that a good deal of
Matthew Arnold's poetry describes Winchester hardly
less accurately than Oxford. At least, in that walk to25o	A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

St. Cross, " Thyrsis " and " the Scholar gipsy" came
often to our minds. As we returned, and noticed how

44 The white fog creeps from bush to bush about,

The west unflushes; "

till at last the beauty of the evening was lost in heavy
rain, we were glad enough to find ourselves once more
beneath the walls of the Cathedral, and threading its
beautiful close, to our somewhat too well-furnished inn.
I say " too well-furnished " in no ascetic sense, but only
because the proprietors of these establishments are apt to
make a good deal of fuss about the entrance of wet dogs
into their well-furnished rooms, and on such evenings as
these, one would give up a good carpet to avoid a battle-
as to whether the dogs should go to the stable or not—a
decision of which it would be by no means easy for any
inhabitant of the inn to hear the last, for they would pro-
bably bark all night. However, though the proprietress
had asked some sour questions as to the dogs early in the
day, she did not witness their bedraggled entrance at
night, since by a masterly flank movement we took them
in at a side-door.	•

The next day we were fairly off for our first objective
point in Hampshire—the New Forest. We drove over
the downs to the pretty woody village of Hursley, passing
close by the church and parsonage of the author of " The
Christian Year"—a fit retreat for that shy and tender
religious genius—dined at Romsey, where an ugly statue
of Lord Palmerston adorns the market-place, visited the
splendid old Norman Abbey, which is being graduallyA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.	25*

stripped of its ugly lath-and-plaster disguises, and re-
transformed into the beautiful building it once was, and
now only needs a little painted glass and the pulling
down of its heavy galleries and high-backed pews to be
one of the finest churches in England; and then asked
our way to Stonycross, where we should be fairly within
the bounds of the New Forest- But in turning sharp
back from a wrong road which we had taken, we lost a
nut out of the trap, which, in all probability, the railroad
journey had previously loosened, and though with no bad
consequences this time, the incident was one which sub-
sequent circumstances induced my wife to recall as one of
the narrowly-escaped perils indigenous in your plan of
campaign. As she justly remarks, the menials and hire-
lings of inns are indifferent to the safety of a passing
traveller's trap, and never care to examine it, or to warn
the owner of its needs. And as, unfortunately, I am not
a very practical person in this respect, in a carriage-
journey of any distance we run the gauntlet of many
risks.

We entered the New Forest at a village called Cadnam,
and found ourselves in one of the many broad roads,
straight as arrows, which traverse it in various directions,
—roads oppressively straight and coherent of purpose,,
which, though they run through the most exquisite
glades, and by copses of wonderful beauty, never seem
lured either to the right or to the left by any human
weakness, but climb up and down hills which they might,
with the greatest advantage both to eye and feet, wind
round, as if it were of the first importance that the direc-252	A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

tion of the shadows of the trees beside them should play
the part of the shadow on a sun-dial to the traveller who
knows the points of the compass between which each road#
runs. And certainly such an object might well have
been contemplated, for, broad and well-made as the roads
are, never were roads more lonely than many of these
straight lines through the forest. We have sometimes
driven for hours without seeing a single man of whom
we could ask our way. One of these straight roads,
which emerged from a thick wood on to a high and open
heath, with glades of forest sweeping away on both sides,
to the north and to the south, brought us to the solitary
inn at Stonycross, where we intended to make our first
considerable halt. The situation seemed to us singularly
beautiful. On the south you saw, at a distance of some
sixteen or seventeen miles, the high reddish cliffs of Alum
Bay and Freshwater, with wave upon wave of heath and
forest land between. To the north, too, the vistas within
vistas of blue distance, with the fainter blue or even white
beyond, where the light caught distant veins of chalk,
gave even more impression of a distant sea-line, than
on the side where the sea really was. In fact, it was
sometimes almost impossible to believe that the sky on
the northern horizon was not a sea sky. Immediately
around us were forests of gorse, shooting up often to the
height of seven or eight feet, and between them lanes of
the short, sweet turf of the downs, dotted with brilliant
heather, and shining with the brightest hollies. The
fern was everywhere. It seemed grafted on to the holly-
stems, for the graceful fern-leaves cropped out of theA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

very heart of the holly-trees often at five or six feet from
the ground; and so, too, the bright heather nestled deep
in the prickly gorse. And how picturesque was the
animal life around our inn ! Herds of forest ponies with
their foals fed not far off, and sometimes crowded round
the inn for company. Flocks of geese flew screaming to
the gate of the farmyard for chance sprinklings of grain.
Brood asses, with fuzzy little donkeys beside them, passed
and repassed. Little black pigs, of which there are large
herds in the New Forest, came hustling the dogs away
for stray bits of biscuit; and mighty cartloads of turf
cut from the heath—the turf towering twice as high from
the top of the cart as the top of the cart was from the
ground—trailed their huge shadows along the road, as
the gorgeous sunset set the sky on fire towards the
Dorsetshire border. When we settled down that first
day at Stonycross, we thought your Counsel, Sir, was the
counsel of a Solomon. Our good tradesman's mare had
done her work to perfection. She had not bolted; she
had not shied; she had not stumbled. She had not
kicked the railway porters. She took no notice of our
shrillest dog. She stood still to admiration when the
dogs wanted to come in to rest, or to jump out to run.
"We had reached the historic spot where William Bufus
fell under the arrow of Tyrrell, and I thought myself in
every respect a fortunate as well as

A Docile Reader.II.

OIR,—When our good mare Nancy was in her stable
resting from her labours, and our luggage was
unpacked from the rather dilapidated pony carriage we
were using for our journey, and while we were still enjoy-
ing that inexplicable consciousness of pious merit which
arises from success in any plan of enjoyment, and which
even a thorough wetting, for instance, will transform into
an odd mixture of humility and self-reproach, we ought
to have seized that favourable moment of self-satisfaction
which recurs so seldom in life, to repair at once to the
4( Hufus Stone/' and there feed our minds on the great
historical associations of which that monument discourses
to all beholders. For, on the day we reached the New
Forest and Stonycross, we had travelled, though in the
reverse direction, over the very ground which William
Bufus's body traversed in the cart of " one Purkess, a
charcoal-burner/' from Stonycross to Winchester; indeed,
the glowing sunset which we saw on our arrival made us
ehade our eyes as we looked on it, just as, according to the
story, William Eufus was shading his from a similar
sunset when Tyrrell's (or some other person's) arrow
entered his heart; so that we might well have recalledA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.	255

ihe scene with all the historical enthusiasm of which our
limited minds were capable. Moreover, it was but two
days after the 775th anniversary of the rough king's
death, and though there is probably hardly a tree in the
forest now which stood there then,—for it is now again
as " new " a Forest as it was in William Rufus's time,—
the general aspect of the scene would, on that account,
only the more closely resemble its aspect when the second
William fell. But, alas! my "historical conscience/' as
Mr. Disraeli calls it, is but a lax one, and my wife's is
laxer still. I never do feel quite equal to the occasion
when I find myself on an historical spot, and am very apt
to skulk the duty of musing, as proper feeling requires
one to do, on the scenes of Time's catastrophes. In fact,
I never knew but one man,—and he was a Professor of
History, and a pompous one,—who did this sort of thing
thoroughly and conscientiously. He travelled once with
a brother of mine in Italy, and I used to hear with amuse-
ment how his chest dilated and his eyes began to roll
when he gazed up at any historic spot or monument of
ancient Rome, and how he would apostrophize it. " And
this, then," he would say, "is the Soracte on which
Horace gazed,—

4 Vides, ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte,'

and the sight of whose weight of winter-snows made the
tender poet shiver; let us imitate his example," he would
proceed, with a genial rapture not quite extemporised,
casting a log on the fire,—(he had ordered a wood fire on256	A SUMMER I)RIVING-TOUR.

purpose, by way of preparation),—"thaw the cold, pile a
liberal supply of billets on the hearth/'—

44 Dissolve frigus, ligna super foco
Large reponens,"—

and so he would go on rehearsing in the grand historic
vein all the conventional associations with as much fidelity
to his " historic conscience " as the actor who blacked
himself even under his clothes in order to let the spirit of
Othello enter the more deeply into him. But we have
never been at .all up to that. Indeed, in these historic
scenes I am not half satisfied even with my reveries,
which are apt to be a trifle bald, let alone my comments,,
which are more so. Yet ever since I read Mr. Langton
Sanford's "estimate" of William Rufus—is it, by the
way, a mistaken impression, Sir, that it was in your own
columns that I read it originally ?—I have had a very
distinct picture of that vigorous but uneven-minded King,
—possibly much too distinct for the truth,—with his
different-coloured eyes, and the angry glittering specks in
them, his strange, staring expression, his " stage-tyrant
manner in public/' and his violent levity in private, his
reckless courage, his strong coarse scepticism, and his way
of looking upon God as a sort of suzerain, from whom, if
he had any cause of grievance against Him, his allegiance
was to be temporarily withheld. But graphic as the
picture of William Uufus is which the rare insight of
that keen and sagacious historian has drawn, and inte-
resting as it was to imagine him dashing off to the sea,—
to the place where Lymington perhaps, or Chris tchurch,A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.	257

now stands,—from the very midst of one of his hunting
expeditions, when he got sudden news of the siege of his
garrison in Mans,—I confess that I put off going to the
" Rufus Stone " for many days, and went there with some
reluctance at last. In the first place, it is a sloppy place,
much frequented by picnickers from Southampton (which
is only eleven miles off) and much adorned by bits of
greasy paper, old bones,—very bad for the dogs,—and
other remains of picnic parties. Also inferior photo-
graphers, who make wretched photographs of the " Rufus
Stone/' flock thither, and press their bad work upon you
at inordinate prices. You are lucky if you do not find
one or two enormous drags drawn up on the spot, and
various young shopmen and women engaged in eating or
flirtation. Then, again, there is no view at all there,—
though one of the finest forest views I know is to be got
from the hill just above it, where you gaze down into a
deep, mysterious ocean of trees, broken by one or two
vistas of open glades, and with a rich blue horizon of
the most various shades sweeping round behind it.
Altogether, though I did go to the spot and duly read the
four inscriptions on the four sides of the " Rufus Stone,"
I think I was able to realise the death scene less vividly
there than in any other part of the Forest. T}ie descend-
ants of " one Purkess, a charcoal-burner," still live close
by in Minstead,—or at least people of the same name said
to be descendants,—and are rather crusty, by the way, on
the strength, I suppose, of their ancestry, if I may judge
by the frigid severity with which one of them received
our praises of her very beautiful myrtle, instead of offers

sA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

ing us a sprig of it, which was what we hoped;—and
very likely they burn charcoal still; at least we came on
a great pile of burning charcoal very near the cottage of
" one Purkess," and not half a mile from the spot where
Rufus fell, though far out of the ordinary range of the
picnic parties. Here it was, in a lovely beech glade, with
the charcoal smouldering fragrantly in a great heap,—
such as one reads of in the legends of Riibezahl, the great
Suabian gnome who loves to appear in the dress of a
gigantic charcoal-burner to those human beings who have
the good or ill fortune to win his favour or excite his
wrath,—that the old story of Matthew Paris seemed most
real to me. Here, far from the picnics and the photo-
graphs, one could fancy the great black stag rushing out
of the thicket by William Rufus, and the king, with his
usual affectation of impatient fury, calling out to Sir
"Walter Tyrrell, "Draw, devil! " and so setting in motion
the arrow which ended his own life, and having to thank
poor Purkess and his charcoal-cart that he got himself
buried somewhat royally in Winchester Cathedral at last.
For us, the "Rufus Stone" had but one merit, that it
attracted all the Southampton picnickers and sightseers to
a singularly sloppy and uninteresting spot, and so left the
rest of the neighbourhood clear for those misanthropists
who were anxious for a season to see as little of their
fellow-creatures as they could.

But as for us, it was not for some days that we visited
the " Rufus Stone " at all. The first day after our arrival
at Stonycross, we made a solemn little procession at a
foot-pace to the smithy of the pretty little village ofA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

259

Minstead, to get the nuts of the trap put right. For
dismal forebodings—almost second-sight—arose in my
wife's mind of still more solemn processions which might
result from any sudden collapse of our already rather
hardly worn pony-carriage. If there is a position in life
which is a cross to human self-respect, it is the position of
attending on foot the complete wreck of your pony-
carriage, as it is dragged in bandaged and spliced, and
drawn, perhaps by a wounded pony, to the house from
which you started at a round pace in the morning for
your excursion, with nothing but favouring omens. We
ourselves, little more than a year ago, had experienced
something of the bitterness of this anguish, when, having
made arrangements to give my pony his mid-day feed out
of a nose-bag on a quiet heath, I, with my usual artless-
ness, took off her bit and blinkers without unharnessing
her, in order to let her eat her food more comfortably.
Alas ! one of the dogs, who always accompany our drives,
began to frisk before her; in the twinkling of an eye off
went the pony in chase, and frightened by the new aspect
of the world as it looked in the absence of the blinkers,
she rushed in wild career over the heath, distributing the
unfortunate carriage in fragments at various parts, and
was only just saved by some opportune rustics from dash-
ing with the remainder into a river. On that occasion
there was a very dismal foot-procession indeed, escorted
by labourers, who pulled a very much mutilated and
bandaged trap for us to the nearest human settlement,
and the remembrance of it has always exerted a salutary
influence over our minds. On the present occasion that26o a summer driving-tour.

influence came into full operation. " Edward," said mjr
wife, " we have got a treasure in our good Watson's mare.
Let us be careful of her, and risk no accident to this
valuable animal. This nut is very near gone. Let us
walk Nancy every step of the way, till we can get it
replaced." And we did. And in spite of the provocative
behaviour of the dogs, who evidently wished to bring on
a catastrophe, we got our nut restored in safety, and had
time also to admire that prettiest of Hampshire villages,.
Minstead, with its fine old grey square-towered church,
and the quaintest of little spires tapering up out of its
tower, and the brilliant yellow corn-fields shining round
it like a tesselated pavement spread in the clearings of the
dark stretches of forest. (By the way, who does get up
the English provincial guide-books ? The latest edition
of Black's "Hampshire" assures us that the ancient
church of Minstead "lies in a deep, leafy hollow,"
whereas it stands on a knoll that rises considerably above
the village, from which its tower and spire are visible for
miles and miles round. And the description given of
Minstead is about as like it, as the description of the
church's position.)

"We found all the most beautiful parts in the Forest
easily accessible from Stonycross by the help of our fast-
trotting Nancy, and had the great advantage of getting
back to cool air and free horizons from all the leafy
beauties of the woods. By the way, the forest fly, of whose
terrors for horses we had heard so much, turned out by
no means formidable—-at least to horses of the bourgeois
kind, as my wife remarked, with much self-congratulationA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR,.	261

-—not near so formidable as the great grey fly, which,
bites without any regard to geographical limitation, in
North and South England alike. The forest fly is only a
fly with a sort of claw by which it fastens itself into the
exterior skin and tickles very much, but without drawing
blood. Nancy made no fuss about it, though the grey
flies teased and bit her badly. The most the forest flies
effected was to make her whisk her tail over the reins,—
a feat only too easy in our low pony-trap. But as in that
awkward plight she not only never kicked, but obeyed
the reins as well as ever till it was convenient to replace
her tail where nature meant it to be, and the reins where
art meant them to be, no great harm came of that. Yery
beautiful is the drive by the Bolderwood enclosures to
Burley, with its ancient oaks, to some of which are given
the name of " The Twelve Apostles;" and still more
beautiful, because more varied, is the drive over a moor
•almost as wild and bare as any in Yorkshire, to the
richly-wooded estuary of the Exe at Beaulieu (or "Bew-
ley," as it is there pronounced),—at high tide a most
^picturesque village, with the remains of a beautiful Cis-
tercian abbey to lend it a special charm. The quadrangle
of the abbey, once surrounded with cloisters, is still kept
as an enclosed garden, one of rare tranquillity and bril-
liancy, a few of the beautiful Gothic arches that formerly
led into the cloisters being still entire. The walls are
covered with ivy, and crusted with moss and lichen. A
magnificent magno/lia in luxuriant blossom and a fine
myrtle grew against the wall, and the flower-beds all
■round the grassy quadrangle had that peculiarly rich262

A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

colour which only the southern coast can show. It wa&
the sort of place for the sun-dial that takes count " only
of the sunny hours." I was reminded of the fine lines on
the " Yala Crucis: "—

" Yale of the Cross, the shepherds tell
'Tis sweet within thy woods to dwell,—

For there are sainted shadows seen,

That frequent haunt thy dewy green.

By wandering winds the dirge is sung,
The convent-bell by spirits rung;

And matin hymns and vesper prayer
Float softly on the tranquil air."

Moreover, the soft beauty seemed all the sweeter for tha
wild moorland by which this richly-wooded southern
estuary is separated from the forest glades of Brocken-
hurst and Lyndhurst.

After spending two or three days in such excursions,
and sedulously interposing days of rest for our inestimable
steed, we set out one rather steamy morning to drive to
Bramshaw and Bramble Hill, whence we promised our-
selves a fine view over the Forest and beyond its northern
border. But we had not got two miles from our inn when
we were alarmed by some irregular attempts to rear on
the part of the irreproachable Nancy, and then followed
a sudden collapse of all her limbs which brought her
sharply back upon her hocks. It was like one or two
slight shocks of earthquake followed by a great convul-
sion. The dogs barked violently; my wife cried out that
Nancy had fallen dead, but I, who was at her head in a
moment, saw that she was only in a slight fit. Cecilia
immediately proposed to rush back for "a man" to aA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.	263

house about a quarter of a mile off on the heath, her vague
impression being, I believe, that I am unfitted by seden-
tary pursuits for any of the physical work demanded o
" a man " in buckling or unbuckling harness. But it wa
not necessary, this time; in about a minute the poor mare
recovered sufficiently to raise herself again, but with
bleeding hocks and trembling like an aspen-leaf. It was
" the megrims,"—a complaint from which the books
cheerfully assure you that a horse which has once had a
fit of it is never again safe. Here was what a French
friend of mine once called " a thundering blow " to our
hopes. And here, of course, began one of those dismal
"processions" of which I have already recorded our
experience and our horror. I led the mare, still slightly
trembling; the dogs were put into their double strap, and
with Cecilia brought up the rear of the mournful party.
Fortunately there were no rustics to witness our discom-
fiture. Not a soul did we meet till we reached the lonely
inn. But we held sad communings on the way, recalling
all the lore of our various handy-books as to horses and
their treatment which bore on this complaint in all its
varieties, from slight shaking of the head to the climax of
"mad staggers." When we reached the inn, I de-
spatched by post a summons to a neighbouring veterinary
surgeon, and then we abandoned ourselves to despondency.
Devonshire became obviously impossible; even Dorset-
shire faded into an ideal not likely to be realised; and a
ghastly vision of future processions of the same nature as
to-day's, and as long as that line of Banquo's kingly pos-
terity which paraded themselves before Macbeth in th e264	A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

witches' cave, spread out in dreary array before my
imagination. Here was an explanation of "Watson's com-
plaisance in selling Nancy, which did more honour to his
understanding than to ours. Our prospects were really
dismal. The New Forest is a lonely place. " Megrims "
might at any time result in a fall which would break the
carriage, or, indeed, the mare's legs, and without help
within five miles. I brooded dejectedly over these
things,—

'' And fears and fancies thick upon me came,

Dim sadness and blind thoughts I knew not, nor could name."

Indeed, when, while following out the reverie contained
in the same poem, I thought

" Of him who walked in glory and in joy,

Following his plough along the mountain-side,"

I felt there could have been no glory or joy for him at all,
had he been aware that his plough-horse was subject to
"Megrims." The very notion of "a driving-tour"
became hateful to me, as I sat gloomily in my inn. I
reproached you for your advice. I bewailed my own folly
in taking it. I was wroth with myself for having been
at once a compliant husband and

A Docile Reader.III.

OIR,—The horse-books assert, in the midst of their very
uncomfortable information about " megrims," that
the class of horses called " star-gazers " are particularly-
liable to this disease. But I never detected any ambitious
astronomical tendencies in poor Nancy, and so could not
reproach myself for having bought her under any
<e notice " of her habit of indulging in those dizzy aspira-
tions which end in fits of giddiness. Our first drop of
consolation was given us by the veterinary, who arrived
after a delay of a day or two, and who drove himself over
to our inn with a horse that must, I think, have been
barely rescued by his skill from the tomb, so wretched
was its appearance. Certainly I was disposed to feel
some confidence in the man who could keep such a
creature alive at all. He was a secret-looking man, with
an expression of chronic surprise stamped indelibly on his
face,—surprise, perhaps, that any one should ever consult
him. Or perhaps it was rather that he looked as if he
had had the private ear of numberless invalid animals
who had confided to him their maladies, but not the
language in which to interpret them to human beings—
for the furtive astonishment of his expression had a dash266	A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

of confidence in it too. He insisted on taking a hopeful
view of " megrims/' against all the traditions of the elders,
and stole about Nancy as if he were in her secret as to
the nature of her attack. He bled her, and he gave her
belladonna, and predicted that the attack would not
return, though here everybody was against him, and the
neighbouring farmers would inquire of me cheerfully if
that was the mare who had had the "megrims," and
volunteer the cordial assurance that we could never be
safe with her again. However, our sanguine veterinary
confidentially whispered to me the history of one or two
cases in which his treatment had at least been followed
by intervals of years, and on his second visit, when I met
him coming out from a very private interview with
Nancy, looking more surprised and secret than ever, he
indicated rather than expressed his astonishment to find
the mare so much better, and assured me she might
undertake her usual work on the following day. How-
ever, we did not venture to resume our "Western tour.
The farther you are from home, the worse is a collapse of
plans. Dorsetshire and Devonshire are hilly countries,
and the prospect of " megrims " supervening on a high
Dorsetshire down, with a shattered trap and lamed horse,
and a modest amount of baggage to be suddenly disposed
of somehow, was so very discouraging, that we thought it
better to write to a friend who was to have joined us at
Lyme Regis to come instead to the New Forest, promising
her an excursion or two to less distant beauties by way of
compensation. Besides the New Forest, picturesque
Lymington and the scenery of the Solent, Salisbury, andA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.	267

Stonehenge were all well within easy reach, and as day
by day the " megrims ""did not recur, we began to cherish
new hopes of the efficacy of that bleeding and that bella-
donna, in spite of the dogmatism of the books. I confess
I was anxious that nothing should go wrong while the
lady who now joined us remained with us. For she had
been an invalid, and her nervous system might be injured
by any catastrophe. Besides she had known me as a
boy, and has always had a keen humour of her own, not
unmixed with a satiric vein ; and in the fits of impatience
which fatal interruption to my plans is too apt to cause in
me, she takes the liberty to make fun of me, and does not
do it badly; so that I was really anxious, not only on
Cecilia's account, but on our new guest's and my own,
that we might have no catastrophes.

Our first long excursion was to Lymington, whence we
hoped to visit Hurst Castle, and crossing the Solent, to
reach the downs above Freshwater. The guide-books
are severe on Hurst Castle. " The historical associations
connected with this ancient stronghold are few and of
little interest." But it has always had a fascination
for me, for its desolate and almost insulated situation,—
in great storms the sea dashes well over the long, sandy
spit, by which alone it is connected with the Hampshire
coast,—and again, from the fact that it was Charles I.'s
prison for three weeks in the gloomy December which
preceded his execution, and that he himself fancied that it
was selected as a spot well-fitted for his assassination. So
we set out for Lymington through the Forest. And as I
shall hardly have another opportunity of speaking of the268

A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

New Forest, let me say here that its special charm is the
mixture of wild heath scenery with forest scenery, and
by no means the special grandeur of the trees it contains.
Windsor Park and Forest contain an indefinitely larger
number of old and mighty trees. There are no beeches
in the New Forest like the grand beech-trees near Wood-
side, in Windsor. There are no oaks in the New Forest
like the old oaks near Cranbourne Grate, in Windsor. But
then there are no great heaths in Windsor Park, like the
high heaths which stretch for|miles and miles within the
borders of the New Forest, and which slope down on
both sides into glades of fern, and beech, and oak, and
chestnut. Transport the high Chobham ridges into the
centre of Windsor Park, multiplied indefinitely in extent,
and you would have the scenery of the New Forest, with
grander leafage and huger boles as well. As it is, how-
ever, you will hardly find anything like the New Forest
elsewhere in England, though a few large sheets of water
would add even to its beauty. The great charm of forest
scenery consists in the wealth of contrast which it affords
between light and shade, brightness and gloom, between
the massiveness of the trunks and the delicate tracery of
the foliage, between the huge immobility of the stems
and the light rustle of the wind among the leaves.
Growths of such grandeur and mass, the seasonal outcome
of which is so delicate, fragile, and transparent, bring
home the artistic life in Nature and the true naturalness
in Art with marvellous vividness and force. But all these
beauties would be increased greatly by a few sheets of
Tvater, which multiply the reflected lights, and give aA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.	269

new atmosphere to the shadow, and which, by placing
before us Nature's own softened image of herself, stimulate
a rivalry between the magic power of the mirror beneath
to give a liquid loveliness to wood and cloud, and the
magic power of the true artist's mind to group and inter-
pret the impressions made on his own eye and heart.
Certainly the beauties of the New Forest, great as they
are, would be greater far with larger streams or lakes.

We set out for Lymington with somewhat anxious
hearts. But Minstead, Lyndhurst, Brockenhurst, were
all reached and passed, and Nancy showed no tendency to
"level downwards/' as the Conservatives used to para-
phrase Dizziness, a few years ago. We reached Lyming-
ton safely, and were delighted with its picturesque broad
street, sloping down to the harbour, went through a sharp
contest with the landlord of the inn, who professed to
have made a general rule against dogs, which he com-
muted, however, on the present occasion, on my self-
assessed payment of a trumpery mulct of a shilling
a-piece on their admission,—a shabby compromise, as it
seemed to me,—and settled to drive the next day to
Key haven, whence it was a short half-hour's row across
the landlocked bay to the gloomy old round-towered
castle which commands the narrow strait between it and
the Isle of Wight. The day was lovely, and the very
solitary drive to Keyhaven, across fields almost destitute
even of a cart-track, where troops of horses were galloping
wildly about, and herds of cows with a dangerous-looking
bull or two were feeding, w&s interesting enough, as it
commanded the Solent and the opposite shore of the IsleA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

of "Wight, and steered straight for the desolate-looking
white tower of Hurst Castle, which we kept throughout
full in view. At length we emerged from " the Marshes"
by a gate which turned out to our surprise to be a turn-
pike,—though as there had been no road at all for the
last mile, it was difficult to say how the produce of the
tolls had been expended,—and found ourselves in the
minute hamlet of Keyhaven, whence the communication
with Hurst Castle is almost wholly by boat, as few people
care to tramp along two miles of rough shingle, by which
alone the castle can be reached by land. The row was a very
pleasant one, the seagulls dipping all around us into the
water, and screaming in clouds over the shingly promon-
tory to our right, while boats with parties of artillerymen,
by whom exclusively Hurst Castle is now garrisoned,
passed us going to and fro in4he bay. Nothing could
have been less like the dreary November day on which
Charles I. was hurried over to this gloomy prison than the
day on which we visited it. The sea and sky were deep
blue, the reddish cliffs of the island opposite, and the green
downs towering above them, showed large and bright.
The next Hampshire headland, Christchurch Head, was
dimly visible through the haze ; between the huge rocks
of the Needles opposite us,—called "Needles," I suppose,
like lueus a non lucendo, because of their bastion-like
massiveness,—the lines of blue sea shone cool and still;
a few ships with sails spread were passing westward down
the mid-channel, and here and there a skiff with full
sheets scudded past. The did guns of Hurst Castle were
dismounted, and the new and bigger ones which were toA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.	271

supply their places not yet in position. But it looked
tlie fortress still, and a formidable one. And even under
that summer sky it had a dreary aspect, with its little
dungeons of rooms,—there was never a state-room, or
anything like one, in Hurst,—and the long naked strip
of causeway by which it connected with the land. The
gentlemen of Hampshire who came there during the first
three weeks of December, 1648, to pay their respects to
Charles, can hardly, I think, have seen him to advantage
there, even in the part he played best,—that of the stately
martyr. The utter dreariness of the place,—little more
than a lighthouse,—the complete preponderance of grey
sea and murky sky over the human actors, in any drama
that could go on there, the want of space and opportunity
for anything like the artificial grace and majesty of a
Court,—for it takes distance and background to give
effect to the refined sadness of a persecuted king, especially
in the still grander presence of imperious winds and
waves,—must have greatly diminished the effect of even
Charles's royal serenity in adversity. The king's forti-
tude, I suppose, never gave way, even when he heard of
Colonel Harrison's arrival, and supposed that he was come
to give him the coup de grace. But it must have been
well for the sort of fame which Charles has gained, that
he was removed to Windsor, and finally to "Whitehall,
and allowed to surround himself with the associations of
palaces, for the closing scenes. He had a sort of passive
greatness, but it was of the kind which comes out better in
the palace than against a cold background of desolate
Nature, such as that in which Sir "Walter Scott, in "Old272	A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

Mortality," so finely places the last scene of the fanatic
Burley's life. Yet this is no reason why the poets who have
made Charles's destiny the subject of tragedy should not
have chosen Hurst for one of the closing scenes. Art is not
compelled to observe all the limits of nature, and it would
have been easy so to paint the grim sea-prison and the
dignified king as to make his royal fortitude shine out
with fresh grandeur. If a poet could write in speaking
of such a place as this,—

"And this grim castle, standing here sublime,

I love to see the look with which it braves,

Cased in the -unfeeling armour of old time,

The lightnings, the fierce winds, and trampling waves,"

—surely poets, like Mr. Butler, for instance, the last and,
I fancy, the best of the dramatists of Charles's fall, might
have produced a fine effect by painting the contrast
between this desolate dungeon encased in its " unfeeling
armour of old time," and beaten by the dim seas, and the
sensitive fortitude which steeled the soul of that vain and
insincere, though refined and stately, and in his sort,
even pious king.

We were soon back at Eeyhaven, where we found
Nancy in the best of spirits, stamping with impatience to
be off. And this time avoiding "the Marshes," we
drove round by the road to Lymington, congratulating
ourselves on the success of the day. Alas, too soon ! A
mile and a half outside Lymington there came another
" thundering blow ;" and this time "a man " was really
needful, for the trap was broken, and had fallen so much
upon the poor mare that till it was pulled back sheA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

27 3

could not rise. Away fled our invalid friend, fleet as the
wind,—I could not have conceived lier capable of such
velocity,—to a neighbouring farm, while I held down
Nancy from her dangerous attempts to rise, and Cecilia
made vain endeavours to pull back the trap. The first
result of our swift invalid's mission was, however, not "a
man/' but a lugubrious woman, who tendered distasteful
commiseration, and whose arrival I resented almost as a
spy's. However, a vigorous labourer appeared soon after-
wards, and assisted us to disentangle Nancy from the
wreck, and take her to the hospitable farmer's stables.
Who shall tell the deep gloom that settled upon us here ?
"We were pressed by the worthy man to take refreshment,
and our invalid friend, who indulges in dietetic views of
her own, accepted a glass of milk, as also did I, not to
seem discourteous; but the vision of that miserable
"party in the parlour" at its milky symposium, I will
not quite say " all silent and all damned," but hardly
able to attend to the farmer's kindly statistics about his
harvest and his pasture-land, or to render due thanks to
his venerable mother's generous desire to wash out our
sorrows with the flowing jug, haunts me yet. I was ask-
ing myself all the time the useless question,—Was it
another fit of the " megrims" or was it a stumble ? I
certainly saw none of the signs of " megrims " which had
marked the previous attack. But then Nancy came
down on all four legs at once, which is not usual with a.
common fall, and there was no stone and no other appa-
rent cause for the collapse. As Dr. Johnson said to
Boswell, when asked if it were better to wear nightcaps

T274

A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

or not, " I do not know, Sir; perhaps no man shall ever
know whether it is better to wear nightcaps or not," so I
may say of this last fall of Nancy's,—" I do not know,
and it is quite certain that no man shall ever know,
whether it was due to ' megrims' or not." But whether
it was or not, did not perhaps very greatly matter ; there
was the carriage broken, the mare with her knee badly
cut,- and our willing and credulous confidence in my
secretive veterinary's bleeding and belladonna greatly
shaken, if not absolutely gone. Then, too, the vapid
consolations tendered to us increased my gloom. The
hospitable farmer with whom we took refuge, encouraged
by our apparent interest in milk, and anxious to give the
coup de grace to our melancholy, bade us follow him into
his cool and certainly exquisite Hampshire dairy, with a
fountain playing in the middle, and large earthenware
jars of delicious cream standing round it. But who can
minister to a mind diseased ? Not poppy nor mandragora,
still less cream in gallons, could soothe my " megrim
haunted brain. The helpful labourer who had led in the
wounded horse and drawn in the maimed carriage, tried
his hand at a stronger sort of consolation. He reiterated
to me many times that' only a fortnight before he had
picked up a horse and cart wrecked on the same spot,
the driver of which was thrown out and killed, and he
dwelt on the coincidence with great facial expression of
mute inward satisfaction, of the nature of which I did not
quite understand the springs. Whether he would have
thought it more artistically complete if I had also been
thrown out and killed, or was gratified to find a progres-A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

&ive amelioration in the character of the accidents at which
he was called on to assist, and discerned some hope of
their being " better yet again, and better still in infinite
progression," I was not at all sure. However, I never
can persuade myself to be thankful because somebody
else has suffered something worse than I, and as I walked
gloomily back to Lymington, leaving the wrecks—ban-
daged carriage and wounded mare—to follow in k the
evening, I turned over in my mind the chances of dis-
posing of poor Nancy and getting a strong forest pony
in her place.

This time we avoided all personal share in the " pro-
fession " of the occasion,—evaded it, that is, for a con-
sideration. The man who was so peculiarly struck with
the second call he had received within a fortnight to
rescue a carriage which had come to grief on the same
spot, was only too glad to associate himself further with
the catastrophe, by steering the wreck into harbour, and
so gaining the opportunity of recounting his double
appearance on the tragic stage in the same character, to
the ears of listening Lymington. But for me, I confess I
was weary of the blows of fate, especially when adminis-
tered in this very humiliating form. Dignity is possible
when one is persecuted, even though one is beaten with
stripes, or has one's feet set fast in the stocks. But dignity
imploring the aid of " a man," dignity in a botched and
bandaged carriage, dignity in driving a horse in knee-
caps, and looking anxiously out for " megrims,"—this is
quite impossible. I was too gloomy to be even impatient.
Indeed, we were all as dejected as King Charles in Hurst276	A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

Castle. And while securing the services of a Lymingfcon?
carriage-maker for the morrow, I could not but reflect
grimly that he could ^hardly mend the trap so fast as
Nancy could break it down. That night, Sir, I went
to bed quite out of sorts with your advice, indeed the
very opposite of

A Docile Beader.IV.

OIR,—The curtain rises for the last act in that very
doubtful experiment which you with your great autho-
rity incautiously recommended to your too docile reader,
and I will not prolong the story, for even warnings lose
some of their force by attenuation. While on the day after
our second catastrophe, the " light car of our destiny/*
as Goethe poetically called the trap which took him to
Weimar, was being repaired at Lymington, we sought
new courage and higher inspirations on the breezy downs
above Freshwater, and greatly enjoyed the sight of those
long stretches of cliff and sweeps of blue ocean of which
Mr. Brett's fine realistic paintings have given all who
have not themselves seen any such ranges of coast and
sea, so vivid a foretaste on the walls of the Academy. On
our drive back to Stony cross, which Nancy performed in
kneecaps, but very cheerfully, as if bent on showing her
undiminished spirit, I took a horsedealer, or rather a
dealer in forest ponies, on the way, and confided to him
my wants and griefs, and a bright little chestnut
pony, five years old, a great beauty, but not strong, and
decidedly a slow-goer,—he would not have covered five-
eighths of the distance that Nancy, when unaffected by278	A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR,

" megrims," would do in the same time,—came up to see
us the next day. But the pony was only fourteen hands,
and I was not certain whether he was " well-ribb'd up,'*
a point on which a horsey friend of mine once tried to
make me discriminating, though without success; not
but what I am grateful to him still, for I find it a most
valuable phrase with which to impress dealers, whose
contempt for me is visibly diminished when I poke the
horse in the ribs, and gravely affect to judge whether or
not this adjective applies to him. Moreover, I wanted a
horse up to my weight for riding, and I find no ponies of
modern breed at all of the capacity of Dandie Dinmont's
Dumple, who carried double—both his massive master
and young Bertram—for I forget how many miles, with-
out noticing the burden. Again, I could not have got
for poor Nancy, under this heavy cloud of " megrims,
much more than half what I gave for her; moreover,,
Cecilia is very conservative about horses, even when they
do break down in this way, and always suspects that
something new will be something much more dangerous ;
to say nothing of her being so anxious about what
becomes of her old dependants, that we generally sacrifice
a good deal to secure them a good berth,—so, on the
whole, we determined to send back the pretty chestnut,
and also another candidate for our service from another
quarter, which was at once old, ugly, slow, and dear, ta
their owners. However, for several days my mind was
vexed with visions of horses. There was a horse-fair at
Eomsey, and strings of horses went and came, the merits
of which were canvassed by our landlord with me as theirA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.	279

owners stopped at the inn in passing. For a time there
were nothing but bargains in the air and dealers " on
the evening breeze/' till I found that, if it be true that
post equitem sedet atrci cura, an even " blacker care " sits
behind the man who is bidding for a horse, than behind
him who is already in the saddle.

In the meantime my holiday was fast ebbing away,
and as the weather was getting cooler, Nancy showed less
and less symptoms of that fulness of blood which causes
or accompanies "megrims," and it hardly seemed worth
while to make a new experiment without the help of that
solemn counsel which a man's friends are always so
willing to tender him on the subject of horses. So one
day, resolutely turning our backs on the scene of our
troubles, we set forth towards Salisbury, Old Sarum,
Amesbury, and Stonehenge, for it struck me that Salisbury
Plain would be a safe, flat place for Nancy in case of
accidents, and that by a resolute plunge into prehistoric
times, one might wash away that humiliating sense of
petty failure which clings like dust to the unsatisfied
holiday-maker. With a mighty and monumental failure
like Stonehenge, to contemplate,—whose, nobody knows,
and by what gigantic efforts so erected as to outlast its
significance for thousands of years, no one can guess,—
it occurred to me that we should be unable to fret over
the infinitesimal grains of fruitless effort which we left
behind us. So bidding adieu to the high moor and rich
landscape of Stonycross with sincere regret, we directed
our steps towards the picturesque stream of the Avon,
which running southwards from the immediate neigh-28o a summer driving-tour.

bourhood of Stonehenge, and through Salisbury, and
cutting for itself a deep trough, under the high land of
the New Forest, separates Wiltshire and Dorsetshire from
Hampshire by a valley very picturesque in its way, and
totally different in character from the neighbouring downs
and moors, since it is rich in branching elms, bright with
cosy mills and swirling weirs, and sprinkled with wide-
straggling villages, which seem to aim at belonging to
two counties at once, without lending anything like a
population worth talking of, to either.

It was pleasant to be among the swelling chalk downs,
crowned by the curious, irregular lunes or crescents of
beech-woods, which are so marked a feature of the Wilt-
shire landscape,—amongst which soon towered up the
spire of " Salisbury Cathedral from the south, south-
west,—one among the many views of that noble struc-
ture which adorned Mr. Pecksniff's pupil-room. No one
who had got his notion of Salisbury from Dickens's story
would have the least idea of the general effect of the
town. To him it is a cheerful English market-town, with
an accidental Cathedral in it, to the organ of which he
sends Tom Pinch, because he happens to have a love of
music. To Mr. Trollope, on the contrary,-r-whose vigi-
lant external observation is at least as remarkable as
Dickens's, only that it catches hold of all sorts of shades
of human character and expression, where Dickens sees
only those which are embodied in some sharply-marked
and easily-catalogued physical sign, — Winchester or
Barchester is inseparable from its Cathedral and the
peculiar life of its clerical inhabitants. Yet in itsA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.	281

different way Salisbury Cathedral is quite as remarkable
as that of Winchester. It is more stately. It is more
completely the focus of the town. Its magnificent west
front, with the graceful spire towering in the background,
presented, to my mind, one of the most imposing architec-
tural effects in England. Its cloisters seem the very
haunts of meditative peace. Its circular chapter-house,
with the exquisite single centre-pillar, from which the
graceful arches spring like the bright curves of a fountain,
with all the quaint simplicity of the Bible history which
is frescoed round its walls, would be one of the most
majestic halls of modern time, if one could but imagine
a cathedral chapter in England convened for business of
the slightest conceivable importance to Church or State.
Then the deep-arched gateways and fine old houses which
surround the close, give the impression less of a shy,
sequestered retreat like that of Winchester, than of the
studied dignity in which a city voluntarily wraps the
Cathedral of which it is proud.

The grass-grown fortress of Old Sarum, one of the
finest of Roman remains, breaks the transition from
Mediaeval Salisbury to pre-historic Stonehenge, where one
really begins to feel that one's ancestors were not quite
like the people of to-day, that " to-morrow, and to-
morrow, and to-morrow" has not always " crept in this
petty pace from day to day," and therefore, perhaps, will
not continue to do so, " to the last syllable of recorded
time." Whoever the architects of Stonehenge were, they
had ruder and more massive ideas of life and power than
we have. They thought far less of piecing and co-282	A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

ordinating and harmonizing, and more of making their
units of effort huge and imposing. Their idea of sacrifice
was not the combination of numberless varieties of energy
for the same end, but the concentration of vast quantities
of human energy for the same end. "We spent a quiet
Sunday morning amongst these striking ruins, and I
remember no Sunday morning more impressive in my
whole life. Not that the effect left upon one's mind was
in any way symbolic of worship or of religious love,—
rather it seemed expressive of that disposition to magnify,
with strained nerves and awestruck heart, "the unknown
and unknowable," which we are now again told is the
only true essence of religion. The architecture of Stone-
henge is precisely that of children. Give any child a box
of bricks, and he will set them up in pairs, with one brick
placed over each pair to cover them in and make a porch
of them, and then arrange them in just such circles as
these. There is something fascinating in thus visibly
representing to the eye how all the possible avenues from
the whole circle of the earth converge on the one central
spot on which you are building, so that for each direction
in which the eye can travel from it,—for each spoke in
the wheel of which the eye is the centre,—there is a
separate vista of prospect, marked by a separate archway
of departure and approach. The fact that the great altar
is so placed that the earliest ray from the risen sun on
Midsummer Day comes straight down one of these
avenues and plays upon it, shows that this notion was
certainly in the thoughts of the builders. And though
it also makes it probable that special homage was paid toA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR. " 285

the power of the sun by the architects, there is nothing in
that to take away from the naivete of the gigantic and yet
childishly rude and simple design. It looks as if this
great plain, or at least vast stretch of undulating down,—
for Salisbury Plain is much less of a true plain than one
expects,—had been chosen for the site of this great
temple, in order the better to present to the imagination
the infinitude of the outer darkness or light into which
the worshipper's vision strained or gazed through these
rude porches. But while illimitable space is roughly
mapped out by it, and the period of the year is fixed by
the avenue at which, in different parts of the year, the
sun's rays enter it, the human energy of which it is sa
massive a monument, seems to be carefully pictured as
hard and dumb and blind, embodied as it is in unhewn
masses of rough rock, every fragment of which it must
have taken a multitude of toiling worshippers to drag,
even on rollers, to its appointed place. The ruin seems to
me to say, with a sort of childish awe and fear,—" Space
and time have laws of their own, glimpses of which we
get, but human force, mighty as it shows itself by these
miracles of effort, has no law or beauty in itself, and can
only set up these rude, misshapen monuments of its capa-
bilities, and range them here as so many pathetic suppli-
cations for light." Certainly a more inarticulate cry to
the Unknown and Unknowable power outside, than this
great circle of rude stone arches embodied, even while it
was still perfect, is hardly conceivable. In some sense it
is more perfect as a ruin than it can ever have been when
no stone had yet fallen from its proper place. The wreck284	A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

of gigantic effort which it now presents seems imbued
with an air of even deeper passion than the uncouth
original itself. We were not disappointed in Stonehenge.

And now virtually our holiday was oyer. Pretty little
Amesbury, where still stand the great stone gateposts of
the convent spoken of by the legend as Queen Guinevere's
retreat in her day of penitence, where the talkative little
novice wrung her heart by her innocent gossip, and
whence later she was borne away in the odour of sanctity
" to where beyond these voices there is peace," was to be
our last place of stay. Again I put the trap and the
snare on a line of railway, and at the other end we found
ourselves not far from home. The journey was all but
over, but not yet, alas! its adventures. With my usual
want of caution, I never looked to see whether this last
vibrating journey on a truck had not loosened one of
those important nuts on which the structure of the
carriage depends. And such, I fear, must have been the
case. We were already within the circle of our ordinary
drives; we greeted the familiar landmarks one after
another, and half an hour more would have taken us
home, when on the summit of the steepest hill in the
neighbourhood I said speculatively to my wife, " Are not
the shafts going up in a very odd manner ? " What she
replied I hardly know, for at that moment Nancy dashed
off, and Cecilia, under the very intrepid but mistaken
notion that she could get to the mare's head in time to
stop her, jumped from the low carriage and fell, though
without any injury to herself, prostrate on the road.
Colin leaped after his mistress. Billy pursued theA SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.	285

carriage, whining, and fully aware that all was not right.
Our invalid friend retained her place for a moment at my
side, as I sawed away at the mare's mouth, just long
enough to assure me that my wife was up again, and did
not appear to he hurt;—then, to my great amazement,
she fell on her knees in the low pony carriage, and seemed
to me to be anxiously sweeping out the bottom of it. But
I had no time to inquire the purport of this, as I thought,
mysterious symbolic action. Nancy rushed down the
deep descent like the " sun-steed of Time/' which,
according to Goethe, travelled on with the light car
of his destiny; and to me, as to him, nothing remained
" but bravely and composedly to hold fast the reins, and
now to the right, now to the left, here from a rock, there
from a precipice, to avert the wheels." Well might I
have added, with him, " Whither he is going, who can
tell ? Scarcely can he remember whence he came/' A
book—it was " Peg Woflington"—flew out on one side ;
a garment, it was our invalid's shawl, on the other; I
feared that my prostrate friend herself would soon follow.
But at last the bottom was reached, and the ascent began.
Now the weight of the carriage was in my favour, and I
had great hope of stopping the mare, though not a little
anxiety,—for beyond the top there was a sharp turn over
a railway bridge, which might have been very dangerous.
However, at last I succeeded in checking the kicking and
frightened mare ; and, rushing to her head, I begged my
companion to see if she could get me help, as I could
not leave the horse's head while she was still in such
excitement. The lady rushed on, waving her handker-286	A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.

chief, to which a neighbouring village quickly responded
by sending forth a column of men across the heath. In
the meantime Cecilia had penetrated into the drive of a
gentleman's country-seat, and come upon another column
of labourers, who streamed in from the other side; so
that we, with the bleeding and foaming Nancy, became
the centre of a moderate-sized multitude of farm-
labourers. It was a harrowing position for a shy person.
However, they, after having succeeded with straps and
cordage in so bandaging the ironwork of the carriage as
to render a slow onward journey practicable, were dis-
missed with sixpence a-piece, one man excepted, who was
appointed to the dismal function of leading this last sad
procession home, and who acted the character of the
undertaker with commendable gravity. Our invalid
friend, who now explained that she had not, as I thought,
been sweeping out the carriage during our mad descent,
but casting herself over the fugitive articles of baggage,
to prevent their following "Peg Woffington" in her
wayward flight, now took her seat in the wreck, playing
<a very good and very stoical mute on this funereal occa-
sion. Poor Nancy, I suppose, was chief mourner, for her
(hind legs were much wounded by kicking against the
unwonted pressure, but Cecilia and I were dejected
enough to make very respectable-looking mourners too.
And so, Sir, at last, by devious and somewhat sneaking
ways, which I took to avoid possible acquaintances, per
mrios casus, per tot discrimina rerum, we reached our
Latium, not a little crestfallen at this third act to our
tragedy.A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.	287

I think you will now admit that a driving-tour is not
without its perils, nor he who advises it without his
responsibilities. This, however, I will say,—that whether
it was that Nancy was so roused by this last adventure
that the lethargy of her brain was dissipated, or whether
it is that she is liable to " megrims" only in hot weather,
she has never since given us a moment's uneasiness, and
will dash past even the best pair of horses in the neigh-
bourhood, when permitted; so that just now, at least, I
would not change her for any two New Forest ponies I
have ever seen. Indeed, in spite of the catastrophic cha-
racter of our driving-tour, I will admit that I may very
possibly try the experiment again,—even with Nancy, in
cooler weather,—though with greater caution as to nuts
and railway journeys. For " megrims," I fear there is
no cure.* But as I now find that though the mare had
had " megrims" before, upwards of two years had inter-
vened between her previous attack and that which
alarmed us at Stonycross, I suppose the actual peril,
except in hot weather, is not appreciable. Still, "me-
grims" apart, I hope I have spoken timely words of caution
to any one who would otherwise have followed my ex-
ample, in becoming your rash disciple as well as

Your Docile Reader.

* I have since had reason to believe that bromide of potassium
given in large doses will avert a threatened attack.A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

vI.

OIR,—-"Nancy" has only had two slight attacks of
megrims since the occasion of our calamities in the
New Forest last year. She is in great force now, and as
I was much concerned by seeing it stated in a local paper
published at the time that I had only myself to thank for
taking "an old screw " about the country, I had intended
to redeem her reputation as a mare of spirit and strength
by taking her this year to Devonshire. But my wife
objected, for two reasons. Devonshire, she said, had
hills of a remarkably unique character, to climb which
you ought to get a pony well accustomed to them,—the
ascent of which, in Nancy's case, might, moreover, bring
on megrims. Further, Nancy wanted green food to keep
off these unpleasant attacks, and ought to be turned out
to grass. These reasons were powerful. At the same
time, I felt that Nancy or no Nancy, the " trap" must
go. Cecilia is not easily satisfied with traps. For her
peace of mind, they must be four-wheeled; they must be
roomy; they must be very low; they must admit of
jumping out on the shortest notice; they must facilitate
the use of a double strap for the pair of dogs which
usually accompany us in this simple auxiliary harness,292	A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

and which are but seldom trusted to run alone, because
they are so ill-disciplined that, if free, they turn aside to
chase rabbits, or even to hunt sheep. All these condi-
tions are not easily satisfied at a few hours' notice, so we
decided to take the trap by railway, and buy or hire a
home-bred Devonshire pony on the spot. This was a
nervous business. I don't look " horsey," and I don't
know how to act the part. The only thing I know how
to do is to poke a horse in a particular place, and remark
that it is not " well ribbed-up,"—a phrase taught me by
a friend. But I don't think that enough to sustain a
reputation for shrewdness, and besides, I have not the
least idea what being " well ribbed-up " really is. When
I consulted my landlord at Exeter, he looked at me so
much in the way in which Littimer, the man-servant,
looked at David Copperfield, that I could not venture to
accept his offer of counsel if I would accompany him to
the bazaar. He evidently, moreover, saw something
ludicrous in my modest expectation that I could buy a
Dartmoor pony in Exeter. "Exmoor, Sir, I suppose you
mean," he said, with a tone of scorn which made me feel
that I was making some great geographical blunder. I
did not defend myself, but Dartmoor was what I did
mean. And why because Exeter is on the Exe you
should only be able to buy Exmoor ponies there, I can't
understand even now. Dartmoor is, if anything, rather
nearer to Exeter than Exmoor. But these are matters
on which I suppose a priori reasoning is no safe guide,
go I felt rebuked. But I was quite determined not to
accompany that very cynical-looking landlord to theA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

£95

bazaar, and lay bare my ignorance under Ms eye. So we
took a carriage for a drive, and I entered into friendly
conversation with, the driver on the subject of ponies
purchasable and hirable in Exeter, and discovering that
lie had a friend a butcher, — and a very handsome
butcher he was,—with two Exmoor, or partly Exmoor,
ponies for sale, we sent for them to try in the trap, and
were much surprised at their minuteness. The elder,—
indeed, the mother,—was a quiet little Quakerish-looking
pony, of a sober cream-colour, which, after Nancy, looked
like a largish mouse. The daughter, quite as little, wias
described by some as iron-grey, with, a dash of bay, but
I should have said roan-colour was the nearest,, She
reminded me a little, in colour, of a high-stepping blue
horse, which a friend once wanted me to buy, and to
which my only objection was that it looked so very like a
vcircus-horse that I was sure all my friends would unani-
mously demand that I should ride it standing and on
one foot,—a feat to which I am not equal. The two
ponies were called " Old Polly " and " Young Polly " by
the handsome butcher, but this was a gross misnomer.
Their was nothing of the " Polly " in them. Evidently
they were " Phcebes,"—neat, demure, conscientious, and
a little conventional. And after driving both up to
Pennsylvania, the high down above Exeter, whence you
.get a distant view both of Dartmoor and Exmoor, and
whence you see Pynes, the very homelike house of the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, beautifully situated below
you, we decided on taking "Phoebe Junior,"—u Phoebe
'.Senior," who was twelve years old, and had a dry cough*294

A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

seeming hardly up to the exertion. If Phoebe Senior was
too old, Phoebe Junior was too young. She was only
three years old, a mere baby ; but the handsome butcher
intimated that the Exmoor breed were generally broken
and worked young, and that this was half-Exmoor, half-
Arab, her father being of the pure Caucasian race. He
would answer for her going up or down the side of a
house, if necessary, with sure foot. The Pennsylvania
ascent, though steep, is not exactly the " side of a house,"
and we noticed that Phoebe Junior was not quite at her
ease in descending it, so there were great searchings of
heart. But I wanted to be off, and to evade the humilia-
ting task of going to the bazaar with that condescending
cynic, our landlord. So we risked it. And Phoebe
Junior, who, of course, repeatedly reminded us of Mrs.
Oliphant and " the young man from 'Omerton who made
an 'it," was installed in Nancy's place, which she just
half-filled. My anxieties were greatly increased by
patronising spectators,—the head ostler amongst them,
—who proffered advice and criticisms of which I did not
wholly fathom the drift. This functionary advised me so
decidedly to take Phoebe Junior, that I, having hitherto
held it as a rule that horsey persons' advice is always
interested and misleading, was very near deciding on
Phoebe Senior, on the simple principle that the ostler
was probably engaged in the handsome butcher's interest,
to advise what was most for the advantage of that gentle-
man and least for our own. Fortunately I abstained
from pushing a sound principle into cases where I had
no independent verification of its value. Phoebe JuniorA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.	295

with care answered our purpose. Phoebe Senior's cough
alone would have destroyed all our pleasure. Moreover,
with broken wind, she would hardly have surmounted
some of our hills. Again, I was much exercised in spirit
by hearing several observers remark, "A breedy little
pony." I knew what a well-bred pony meant, but all
ponies must be bred, and whether " breedy " meant well-
bred or ill-bred I felt in great doubt. I was not quite
sure from the tone whether the epithet was said in praise
or blame. I was aware that weeds are very apt to breed
fast, and the tormenting idea struck me that this word
might be Devonshire for "weedy,"—which I knew to
be a horsey term of great dispraise, though I hardly
knew in what sense. When I asked the meaning of the
term, the persons who used it gazed silently at me and
were obviously grieved. This cost me many minutes of
anguish. I have since had reason to believe that they
meant well-bred,—which indeed Phoebe Junior was. She
was a little thin-skinned, the least roughness of the
harness fretted her; a little weak in her graceful little
hind-legs; a little conventional; she was never frisky
or skittish, and did not indulge in one joke all the time,
—but this absence of fun was a great merit in Cecilia's
eyes. A little Dartmoor pony whose acquaintance we
subsequently made had, I should think, more humour in
her than Phoebe Junior, and Phoebe Senior, and all their
ancestors put together. However, perhaps this pretty
and gentle pony would not have suited us. Cecilia likes
humour, she says, but not in harness.

' Well, before our journey to Dartmoor we were bound296

A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

to Lyme Regis. Cecilia had known Charmouth long
years ago, and wished to revisit it. I, too, had the
greatest desire to see the chief scene of Miss Austen's
" Persuasion," especially that upper Cobb, from which
Captain Wentworth jumped down Louisa Musgrove once
too often. So we turned our little mouse's head eastwards
towards Ottery St. Mary, which lay in our way, the place
of Coleridge's birth, and in the neighbourhood of which
the present Chief Justice of the Common Pleas still has
a residence. It was a grand sight to see us drive out of
Exeter, with a rampart of luggage opposite us almost
high enough to eclipse little Phoebe's diminutive form,
one dog barking vehemently in the carriage, and one
running ecstatically in the mud. The officials of the inn
prophesied in low tones that the pony was not strong
enough for such a vehicle. And indeed I denounced the
carpet-bag, which cast its portentous shadow upon us,
as Atlas flung its shadow "across the Western foam," as
an article of cargo which must be sent home at once in
order to lighten the ship; so it returned by rail from
Ottery St. Mary. Our drive lay through a wide and
smiling landscape, but hardly one of high beauty, Phoebe
Junior showing a well-disciplined spirit, and behaving
with the utmost phlegm and propriety, even when we
met a large detachment of Yolunteer Artillery on the
march from Honiton, which would have startled any pony
with a less old head on its young shoulders. The view
down the wide, bright valley of the Otter.—full of light,
but full also of indolent and dreamy colour, like Coleridge's
genius,—with the distant gleam of the Channel on theA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

297

horizon, and the great heathery hill which divides the
Otter valley from the valley of the Axe, facing us, was
beautiful; and we were glad to stay for the night in the
prettily situated little town, to which, however, a great
silk-mill had given something of a noisy and stirring
character since Coleridge wrote his sonnet on his native
stream. But the Otter itself was as limpid, its sands as
bright in colour, and its margin as willowy as when he
saw its water " with all its tints" flowing before his eyes,
and described,—

" Thy crossing plank, thy margin's willowy maze,

And bedded sand, that veined with various dyes
Gleamed through thy bright transparence to the gaze."

Indeed, we were glad to let both the dogs gleam through
the Otter's " bright transparence " to our gaze, for they
were all the brighter themselves afterwards. It was a
still more lovely drive the next day to Lyme. I gave
Phoebe Junior a "leader" to help her up the great hill
out of Ottery, which rose up like a wall east of the little
town, and Phoebe appreciated this attention. She had
not turned a hair when the clumsy old horse and his
driver departed from us, leaving us on a wild heath
looking at a view as broad and fair as any English
county contains,—the wide-based, gradually inclined
cones of the Devonshire hills stretching to the north and
west of us, and the inner slopes of the cliffs of the Channel
to the south. Phoebe trotted as merrily over the level
table-land of the next few miles as if she had found no
weight in the carriage at all. But after passing theA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

bridge over the Axe her aplomb was tried by meeting one
of those frightful traction-engines, which are preceded
by a herald with a flag of warning. Yet Phoebe's aplomb
was not found wanting. Perhaps she wants imagination,
but she has wonderful self-possession for a baby of three.
The first glimpse of Lyme and Charmouth bay, and the
Dorsetshire cliffs stretching out to Portland Island, on a
sea as blue as the deepest of Italian skies, was as striking
as the first glimpse of an Alpine landscape when you
surmount the shoulder of the pass. The sea was one
wide sheet of deep and lustrous blue, the white town
nestled beneath looked far more romantic than was at
all needful for the scene of the very sober passion of any
of Miss Austen's heroines,—even her best and gentlest.
The richly-coloured and deeply-furrowed cliffs beyond
Charmouth,—Golden Cap, with his yellow crown, and
all his many-coloured companions,—gave a splendidly-
variegated setting to that still deep world of blue ; while
far to the south, Portland Island melted away into the
sea, like some island of the blest, instead of the purgatory
of convicts it is. There was not a white speck upon the
ocean except a solitary sail, and the delicate curve of
foam trending away along the beach. But a moment of
peril was approaching. The descent into Lyme is a long
steep slide. Phoebe Junior's strength was in her mind
rather than in her legs. Cecilia descended. I descended
and went carefully to Phoebe's head. The dogs barked.
The little creature struggled more and more against the
weight of the carriage, but at last when the incline was
near 45°, she began to " cave in," and my belief is thatA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.	299

she was about to adopt the expedient of some Devonshire
ponies on their native hills, when they squat down and
slide. Cecilia, haunted with the notion of megrims, cried
to a man that the pony was having a fit. He gave it
as his opinion that she was only squirming beneath the
fretting of some of the harness, which had rubbed off a
little of her skin, but it was all that I and another volun-
teer from Lyme could do to persuade her not to sit down.
Cecilia tugged behind to diminish the pressure of the
carriage on Phoebe Junior. A few mild-mannered and
rather apathetic boys collected to watch the transit.
Lyme expressed a grave interest rather than an indecent
curiosity in the matter, but tendered no unnecessary help.
When we reached the inn at last in safety, the ostler
remarked that for such ponies as ours, on such hills as
those of Devon and Dorset, a drag was absolutely requi-
site, and from that day the history of our drives was the
history of a lively and incessant controversy between
Cecilia and myself on the propriety of using or not using
that "irrepressible" drag. It was a sort of drag-hunt
through Devonshire.—I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

Your Last Year's Correspondent.II.

OIR,—Lyme Regis is a precipitous place, and asso-
ciated with precipitate people. Its principal street
seems, as Miss Austen says, to hurry down into the
water; the cliffs in the neighbourhood are fertile in
landslips; indeed, much of the shore is now a lovely
wilderness of crumbled cliff, overgrown with the finest
sward and ferns and shrubs. It was at Lyme that
Monmouth landed when he hurried into his premature
revolution; and at Lyme that Louisa Musgrove, in Miss
Austen's novel, when intending to jump into the arms of
Captain "Wentworth, fell almost lifeless at the feet of
Captain Ben wick, and by consenting to console the latter
for his recent grief, set the former free to return to his
allegiance to Anne Elliot. Macaulay speaks of the town
as a " small knot of steep and narrow alleys, lying on a
coast wild, rocky, and beaten by a stormy sea,"—not, I
think, a very happy description; for on the whole, Lyme
is contained in its single street, which, though as steep
as a street can be without spilling its inhabitants into
the wrater, is wide, bright, and picturesque. I wonder
where exactly it was that Monmouth landed, drew his
sword, and kneeled to thank God " for having preservedA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE,

tlie friends of liberty and pure religion from the perils
of the sea," before " leading them over the cliffs into the
town." It can hardly have been on the side of Pinney,
for the cliffs there are too steep. Can it have been
in pretty little Charmouth, where the Char bends and
wriggles about till it can find a channel through the
shelving and mounded beach into the sea, and where a
great break in the line of cliffs opens out the green up-
lands and wooded slopes of Wootton, through which the
pretty stream bubbles away so pleasantly P I wonder why
Monmouth did not land at the Cobb itself, which, accord-
ing to Macaulay, is as old as the Plantagenets, though
since Monmouth's time, and even, I take it, since Miss
Austen's, that picturesquely curving breakwater has
been rendered considerably more solid and convenient.
Perhaps he wanted to marshal his men before he tried
the temper of the town, enthusiastic as it is said to have
been in his cause. For us, we did not turn a single
thought on Monmouth and his ill-fated precipitateness;
we were thinking too much of that other bit of precipi-
tateness, belonging to the realm of fiction, instead of that
of history, and therefore so much easier to realise, invented
by the skilful novelist, not only for the purpose of smooth-
ing the way to her pleasantest heroine's happiness, but
also in order to set off the mild and pensive beauty
of that heroine's certainly not too impetuous character.
"Were we, perhaps, in the very room where the Upper-
cross party's merriment attracted the envy of Mr. Elliot
—the unknown and unknowing cousin—as he sat alone,
wishing he had any excuse for making their acquaint-302

A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

ance ? Here, at any rate, as we turned the corner of the
street to the beach, was the very spot where Mr. Elliot's
glance of admiration at Anne, as she returned glowing
from her windy November morning's walk, revived
Captain Went worth's old ardour of feeling, and prepared
the way for his return to his senses. Here, too, were the
Assembly Rooms, which the Musgrove party naturally
found lifeless in November, and which appeared, as far
as we could gee, equally lifeless in August also. Here,
again, it was that Captain Benwick came flying by to
fetch the surgeon for the insensible Louisa. And here,
surely, close on the Cobb, was that very minute house of
Captain Harville's, which his ingenuity fitted with all
sorts of contrivances to make up for the smallness of the
space and the deficiencies of the lodging-house furniture.
Indeed, some of these contrivances appeared to be extant
still. We half-expected to meet the very party on the
Cobb, forgetting that Anne Elliot,—I should say Mrs.
"Wentworth, that "too good, too excellent creature," as
she is called by her lover in the soberly passionate
language of the beginning of the century,—must, if
still living, be eighty-seven this year, and her husband
well on into the nineties, while even Louisa, now Mrs.
Benwick, if indeed her constitution has survived so long
that shock which, long after her convalescence, made her
" start and wriggle like a young dabchick " whenever a
door banged,—is at least fourscore. Indeed, those small
children who take such pleasure in finding all the pos-
sible ways of ascending and descending between the upper
and lower Cobb cannot possibly be more nearly relatedA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

3°3

to these antique heroines than as grandchildren or great-
grandchildren. And if that rather common-place lady,
who sits at the very end of the Cobb, gazing at the now
discoloured and rising sea, is Mrs. Ben wick's daughter,
already past middle age, recalling the story of her mother's
accident and the change it made in her destiny, there is
in her certainly more of the solid Musgrove than of the
romantic temperament of the father who loved to quote
Byronic addresses to the dark blue waves. It is, indeed,
but too certain that, if all the actors in that little tragi-
comedy had been as real as they are easily realised, they
would most likely before this have made their bow and
final exeunt, like the woman to whose delicate genius
they owe their curiously strong hold on our imagina-
tions. We, unfortunately, had no similar adventures.
Perhaps for us the time, even for Miss Austen's mild
romance, is past. But when, in a glorious August night,
we turned the corner where Anne Elliot's beauty gained
the admiring glances of her cousin and Captain Went-
worth, and were suddenly met full in the face by the
" long glory " of the autumn moon shining down the sea,
and little Billy gently waving his yellow tail,—itself
apparently a sheaf of moonbeams,—stood studying the
glittering line which terminated so picturesquely in him-
self, I know that admiring glances were bent upon him
which might well have rivalled the fervour of Mr. Elliot's
or Captain Wentworth's glance at the heroine of " Persua-
sion." The genius of Landseer would have needed the
aid of the genius of Turner properly to render the scene.
A young friend of mine, an artist, who will yet make hisA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

power felt in the world of art, assures me that there can
be no genuine picture without a "human interest" at
the centre of it. Would not a canine interest do ?
Certainly it seemed to me that that long shaft of light
which led up to little Billy, was a fit subject for the
grandest art.

There is tolerably good evidence that the scenery
of Lyme had made more impression on Miss Austen's
imagination than that of any other part of England
known to her. She speaks of the wilderness of fern and
rock and tree among the ruined cliffs between Lyme and
Pinney,—the great landslip beyond had not happened
in her time,—with something like rapture, a state of
mind which, to her sober though vivid nature, was as
rare as it must have been delightful. Indeed, those were
not the days of popular devotion to natural beauty,
Wordsworth was only beginning to educate the English
imagination; Ruskin was not yet; and the religion of
natural beauty was in its infancy; Miss Austen herself
does not, I think, give us a single bit of fine scenery-
painting in all her novels. But she does go out of her
way for the space of a single page to indulge in a sort
of reverie of delight over the loveliness of Lyme and its
neighbourhood, though she does not describe it; and I
think she must have felt the latent poetry in her so far
stirred by the deep blue sea and crumbling cliffs of
Lyme, as to make it seem to her a specially fit scene
in which to place that final triumph of the affections
over a cold and worldly prudence which is the subject of
" Persuasion."A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.	305

Our drive back to the edge of Dartmoor through East
Devonshire was full of beauty, though not beauty of the
startling kind. Wide-based hills rising gently to a
wooded summit; deep green lanes, whose only fault was
that they quite shut out the rich view; limpid rivers,—
the Axe, the Otter, and the Exe,—rippling in long zig-
zags through the richest pastures and through fragrant
woods of fir, strewn deep with the fir-needles of former
years ; churches of that picturesque Devonshire and
Somersetshire type—I don't know how to describe them
architecturally—which gives to each its solid square
tower, one of the four edges being replaced by a minute
round tower, running the full height, while four little
pinnacles surmount the whole; rich, grave sunsets, with
crimson clouds reflecting and steeping in ideal beauty the
shapes of the hills beneath, and sending right down to
the horizon golden streamers which seemed like hopes
escaped into the sky from some lofty imagination,—such
hopes, perhaps, as were in Shelley's vision when he made
it the attribute of a demigod,—

" To hope till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates,"

—these were our enjoyments morning after morning, and
evening after evening, as Phoebe Junior took us steadily
and gently back to the edge of Dartmoor.

Wherever we went the people were the same,—gentle,
dignified, not very full of life, always ready to oblige;
never volunteering help, but taking some pains to explain
what you asked for, yet never anticipating a question or

x306

A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

a want; a people naturally gracious and high-bred, but
certainly not agitated by that superficial interest in
strangers which you see in so many parts of England.
Our teem of dogs never, that I saw, excited a smile,
though in many counties no one passes without pointing
and laughing at them. If we had to ask our way, the
women who were keeping house were always [in the most
retired part of their cottages, never in front or at the
windows. Devonshire, as a rule, disapproves of eccen-
tricity or enterprise. If we wanted to make our way
across country by some unorthodox cross-roads, the diffi-
culties we found in obtaining the right directions were
almost insuperable. The Devonshire men would not
hear of your cutting off a corner by means of the smaller
cross-lanes usually traversed only by the inhabitants of
neighbouring villages. They would willingly have sent
us back to the turnpike road, even when it would have
involved retracing our steps for miles. The only way
was to ask for the next village in our intended road, but
the faultiness even of the Ordnance maps rendered that
plan not always feasible. There was, however, an air of
high-breeding even about the villagers. They did not
stare. They did not wonder, except occasionally at the
breast-band which we had substituted for a collar in
Phoebe Junior's harness, an arrangement at which the
ostlers occasionally expressed a well-bred surprise. And
as were the men and women so were the dogs,—very
gentle, very courteous, not at all boisterous, but certainly
more numerous in proportion than the men. The human
population of Devonshire is decidedly sparse, and IA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

307

wonder how many of them, pay the Dog-tax. Also the
dogs seem more disposed to give an active welcome to
strangers than the men. We were much pleased, on the
whole, with the dogs of Devonshire, who had all the
graciousness of their masters and more life. They had
•evidently been taught to control their first impulses.
" Bite, but hear me !" had appealed, as it always will, to
their sense of shame. Even in their own farmyards they
looked before they leaped, and therefore never leaped
upon us. I am sorry to say they put our dogs to shame
as regards manners. The canine civilisation of Devon-
shire is as far above that of Surrey, as the age of bronze
was ahead of the age of stone. The expression " a dog-
and-cat life " would have no meaning in Devonshire. In
the Devonshire plains, at all events, the cats live as
much out in the open air as dogs. They repose in the
middle of the road. They expect no ill-bred assaults
from passing dogs. Like the women in America, the
cats of Devonshire take part in public business, and are
not insulted. Even our dogs were more or less subdued
to the temper they found prevailing. Little Billy,—a
dog of great beauty, or as Cecilia generally introduces
him, " a dog of whom I am justly proud, with large ears
and a large tail,"—though he began his career in Devon-
shire by biting the shop-boy of a dealer in photographs and
works of fine-art in Exeter, was much softened down
before he left by the contagious courtesy of the local
dogs, and he allowed several chambermaids to pat him
without even uttering a growl, which is quite contrary to
his wont. " Old Pup," or " Mobled Queen," as we some-308

A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

times call her, after Hecuba as described in Hamlet, from
the frenzied aspect of her twisted and Medusa-like locks,,
who, if she has a weakness in the world, detests to be a
mere spectator when food is being discussed, learned
•under the refining influence of the canine civilisation of
Devonshire to sit tranquilly in a chair at a table d'hote
at Lynton, and astonish the company by her aplomb and
good-breeding. Evidently the dogs of Devonshire had
<( soothed her with their finer fancy," " touched her with
their lighter thought." Assuredly there is no county to*
my knowledge where you can get so much of the wild
moorland grandeur with so little of the wild moorland
manners,—so little roughness and barbarism either in
man or dog, as on the great moors of Devonshire. You
meet everywhere men and dogs who have " set their face
in many a solitary place, against the wind and open
sky;" but there is no hardness in their eye, as in Peter
Bell's.

" In his whole figure and his mien
A savage character was seen
Of mountains and of dreary moors,"

says "Wordsworth. And I have seen this often in the
Yorkshire cragsman and sheep-dog. But there was
nothing of the kind in the shepherds and farmers, the
mastiffs and the collies of Dartmoor or Exmoor.—Yours,
&c.,

Your Last Year's Correspondent.III.

OIR,—The stars were shining brilliantly, and Phoebe
Junior was beginning to betray a strong opinion that
every gate we passed ought to be the gate of her ap-
pointed stable-yard, before we drew up before the quaint
and foreign-looking archway of the Three Crowns at
Chagford. The accumulated dust of many and various
hills was on the drag, which had been in constant service,
for though from St. Mary Tedburne to Crocbernwell,
Drewsteignton, and Chagford was mainly an up-hill
journey, there were many and steep descents, and Cecilia
was inconsolable if I did not put on the drag even for
some of the mildest. IsTow and then, I believe, she
wished me to put it on for going up hill, though she
maintained it was down hill; indeed, nothing will be
found to sustain more effectually Professor Ray Lan-
kester's statement that there is " an unsuspected amount
of incapacity for observation" among ordinary people,
than our very lively discussions at times as to whether we
were going up hill or down,—not, of course, that I would
any sooner admit that we are ordinary people than that
ours are ordinary dogs, an hypothesis so absurd that you
might use it to disprove any o'ther which logically fol-
lowed from it; but on the score of powers of observation,3io

A DRIVE IN* DEVONSHIRE.

taken alone, I admit ours are not among the greatest
spirits of the age. The drag controversy at times became
so vivid, that I thought of laying a spirit level across the
seats of the trap, and conditioning that only when the
air-bulb mounted in the opposite direction to Phoebe
Junior, should there be any question of the drag; but
I doubt if Chagford could have produced the article.

There could hardly be a more picturesque situation
than that of Chagford, though the town itself is, if I may
be excused the truism, " towny." It has a newly-built
market-place, which it at once judiciously shut up,* the
townspeople, I suppose, preferring the alternative of no
market-day and silence. This, I thought, showed a
candid and open mind in the townspeople,—the power
to confess and repent promptly of an error being unusual
on the part of municipal bodies. The churchyard, imme-
diately opposite our inn, which commands a beautiful
view over the valley of the Teign, is the popular prome-
nade and meeting-place of the town. There go the
perambulators, and there congregate the men. Many a
child, I think, might say, with Wordsworth's little
heroine,—

" My stockings there I often knit,

My kerchief there I hem;

And there upon the ground I sit,

I sit and sing to them.

" And often after sunset, Sir,

When it is light and fair,

I take my little porringer,

And eat my supper there."

* I hear that it is now (1877) in use.A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

311

Stately trees give it shade. Crowds of white butterflies
haunt the place, as though to supply the favourite
emblem of immortality. There seemed to be a close
alliance instead of a natural antagonism between the
Churchyard and the Inn ; for the inn was not noisy, and
in the churchyard there was no gloom. The scenery
around was most lovely. By twenty minutes' climb
behind the inn you may reach the top of one of the
many " tors " into which Dartmoor swells, and command
a lovely panorama of rolling moorland, pastures re-
claimed from the wild, and distant faint blue hills.
Antique granite piles crown half the heights around,
adding greatly to the picturesqueness of the effect. And
the valleys are not mere depressions in the moorland, but
often romantic wooded glens, like that of the so-called
parks, Gidleigh and Whyddon, which are not parks at
all, but wild glens, where the Teign rushes through boul-
ders as grand as those which stud the bed of the Wharfe
at Bolton, or that of the Dove in Dovedale. The old
thatched Mill, with its great water-wheel, in Holy Street,
as it is called (in Gidleigh Park), is the paradise of artists,
—and they do not neglect it. Still more wild and
sequestered is Whyddon Park and its neighbourhood,
where the Teign suddenly enters one of the most unique
and rugged little gorges which I ever saw. It has a sort
of toy sublimity about it, if I may be permitted the
paradox, resembling one of the grandest Scotch glens
where a river runs between bare and steep though
rounded mountains, if this were seen through a reversed
telescope so as to dwarf its scale. These were indeed312

A' DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

but dwarf mountains, which, under ordinary circum-
stances, might be climbed in five minutes, by which the
Teign was bordered, but so bold and so bare of everything
but burnt-up grass and prickly gorse that they, and the
great granite boulders through wThich the Teign sparkles
at the bottom, give an effect of grandeur and confusion
far beyond anything that the minute scale of the whole
would warrant. A pertinacious desire seized me to see a
certain " Logan-stone99 in the bed of the stream here,—
in other words, a granite boulder which a short time ago
was a rocking-stone, but which has now got so silted up
with sand that it rocks no longer,—and as we approached
the river on the side on which there was no path, I had
to get Cecilia and the dogs through the stream by fording.
Even Cecilia, however, found it far from unpleasant, in
that warm summer's evening, to paddle in the clear
brown water. You seem to make the scenery more your
own, to enter deeper into the heart of it, as you get rid of
shoes and socks, and feel rushing round you the very
water which is on its way into the rocky gorge at whose
mouth you stand, for here the Teign passes abruptly from
broad and smiling meadows into a narrow cleft between
the round, bare hills. We reached the Logan-stone, only
to find a great stone oddly-balanced on a small one in the
middle of the solitary stream, and a warning to fishers to
beware of fishing—I suppose without the owner's leave—
painted in large, black letters on it, to my great discom-
fiture, not because I wanted to fish, but because it
introduced various unpleasant reminders of proprietors,
magistrates, and game-laws into the heart of that wildA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

scene. Then what a climb we had up the side of the
hill! It was not the mere steepness, but the glassy slip-
periness of the sward, and the prickliness of the gorse at
which you caught to hold your own, which made it so
difficult. Cecilia would not trust the dogs to themselves,
as they were keen after the rabbits, nor to me, from a
general distrust of my vigilance, so they dragged her
about whithersoever the scent of the rabbits took them>
and the sward gave her no footing, and the gorse pierced
her gloves, till at last I found her, prostrate and wounded,
at the very edge of the summit, crying out that the dogs
were dragging her back into the abyss. Safely landed,
however, on the north-western boundary of the ravine,—
which is called Huns-tor, and which is strewn with the
same grand fragments of granite which everywhere make
the scenery of Dartmoor recall to us the age of stone,—
what a sunset view we had for our reward! The opposite
opening of the ravine is covered with gnarled oaks, and
with huge mossy rocks, like those on which we sit.
Eastwards the Teign winds away into the solitary gorge
with an effect as if it were running up hill; and west-
wards Dartmoor rises in a series of hills, on all of which
huge granite cairns break the line of gold and crimson
sky; delicate pink cloudlets float about in the air above
us like fragments of an interrupted dream, and as they
turn pale at last we reluctantly leave our delightful rest-
ing-place, and plod back to Chagford beneath a starlight
as brilliant as that of the tropics.

The only fault of Dartmoor to the visitor is that you
find it very hard indeed to establish yourself upon it.3H	A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

The towns are not the places you would voluntarily
choose; but the only inns where they don't make diffi-
culties about keeping you are in the towns. In the
moorland villages, where you would like to stay, the
landlords are kindly and hospitable for an hour or two,
but resolute not to have you above a single night at
most. At North Bovey, for instance,—most picturesque
of Devonshire villages, built round a group of oaks and
mighty ashes, and with a magnificent old weather-beaten
church watching over it,—we persuaded a village land-
lady to keep us for a night, but when the morning came,
kindly but firmly she insisted on our departure, under
penalty of remaining without dinner and without attend-
ance, We were most reluctant to go. I was somewhat
unwell, for the previous night,—

4 4 A night

In which the bounds of heaven and earth were lost;"

had blazed hour after hour with lightning; and little
Billy, who had rashly swallowed a bee or wasp, and got
stung in the throat, had allowed us little sleep, having
been literally what the transcendental lady in " Martin
Chuzzlewit" felt she should be, if she dwelt long on the
enigmas of life,—a " gasping one,"—through all the
earlier part of the night. But go we must. Firmly,—
not peremptorily,—we were ejected and sent on to
Manaton,—an island green with a granite boulder on it,
and another equally picturesque church watching over it,
flanked by a yew of vast dimensions, where another nego-
tiation of the same kind began. "We might rest thereA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.	315

a bit, and lunch, and then try a farm-house about half-a-
mile on, but they did not take staying visitors."—" Had
they no bedroom ?"—" Oh yes, but they were not accus-
tomed to staying company, and they never had fresh
meat."—"Well, but if we agreed to bacon and eggs ?"—
" Well, they were not anxious for staying visitors." And
all this was so pleasantly said, and with such obvious
friendliness, that it was impossible to feel offended. At
last the host interceded with his wife that we might stay
one night, and never did we have pleasanter accommoda-
tion or better-prepared meals. But the next day, again,
mildly but positively, we were dismissed; for Saturday
night and Sunday were coming, when our room would be
much more useful than our company. On we must go.
It was a pity; for Dartmoor is not really to be seen from
the towns, and Manaton is one of the finest situations
for really entering into the grandeur of its scenery. The
most characteristic of its cairns,—the one called Bower-
man's Nose,—a great pile of granite, the top of which
has been worn away by many a blast into the shape of
a rude becapped Hindoo idol with a mighty nose,—is
within a mile of Manaton, on the wildest part of the
moor. Numbers of almost equally picturesque cairns
surround it, within a circle of a few miles. Here, as you
approach, there seems to be a council of Scandinavian
Gods, Thor and Odin and their compeers, sitting in grand
divan. There, again, the boulders seem to make up the
ruins of a mighty castle. In another place you see in the
distance what resembles the wreck of an Egyptian pyra-
mid. And for miles and miles between them the autumn316

A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

gorse spreads its rich and fragrant sea of yellow blossom,
interspersed at rare intervals with a band of purple
heather,—Rippon Tor, for instance, has such a grand
zone of imperial purple round it,—while here and there
a scarlet-breasted stone-chat is sunk in reverie on one
of the boulders, or a plover hovers above you trying to
divert your eye from the neighbourhood of its nest. It
was in such places as these that we wanted to stay ; but
only in places like Chagford, Ashburton, Tavistock, and
Okehampton could we really abide as long as we liked,
and there we were not on the moor, and in some of them
at a considerable distance from it.

Still, at Ashburton,—where we found the perfection of
an inn, with an old garden, and a thirty years' gardener
devoted to his flowers, and where we met friends of con-
genial tastes, who had frequent bulletins of the condition,
of a dog and a sparrow, both of high intellectual develop-
ment, and who could enlighten our ignorance as to the
different species of fern which crowded the deep-sunk
lanes,—Phoebe Junior and we greatly enjoyed our stay,
though Phoebe Junior never had a harder task than that
of drawing us through Holne Chace and over the moor
from Ashburton to Two Bridges and Princetown, where
the road climbs for at least six miles, and climbs up roads
so stony as well as so steep that sympathy with Phoebe
Junior took away much of our pleasure in the magnificent
views of the romantic windings of the Dart. Steadily
she toiled on, with her master at her bridle and a kind
mistress scotching the wheels from time to time, that she
might rest on the toilsome ascent; hill after hill layA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.	317

behind her, and ridge on ridge of moorland before, till
at length Dartmeet bridge was crossed, and as the sun
hid himself behind clouds, and a cold wind rose, and
the beautiful shapes of the moorland ridges disappeared
and were succeeded by long, flat, desolate stretches, we
approached Two Bridges and Princetown, and that gloomy
region where sentries pace about the road, and the prison
bell rings out from time to time the sad succession of the
great prison's regulated hours. At Two Bridges, which
is the advance-guard of Princetown, we passed the dreary
lees of a yesterday's fair,—a desolate booth or two, where
boys were still paying their penny for a shot, and small
children buying unwholesome sweets. "Within a mile, in
a desolate ravine to the north, lies the weird little dwarf
oak copse, haunted by vipers and penetrated by such deep
gullies that it is said you may sink suddenly to the neck
if you venture within the network of the gnarled and
moss-grown branches, which is called Wistman's or Wise-
man's Wood. Not an oak exceeds, I think, ten feet in
height, and most are but eight feet or six. Every branch
of every tree that we saw was cushioned with the softest
moss and lichens, so that the air of hoar antiquity about
the dwarf wood is inexpressibly striking. When the
mists are swirling about the ravine, as they often are, the
wreirdness of the spot must be most oppressive. It is just
the place for an escaped convict to hide himself, and after
a few hours spent with the vipers, and of listening to the
sighing of the wind in these prehistoric oaks, to give
himself up voluntarily, out of sheer preference for the
prison. Yet under the sunshine, when the herds of318	A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

Dartmoor ponies are galloping about and dashing down
with one consent to the stream to drink, the drops from
the spongy ground flashing up behind their heels like
diamonds in the sun, and the stone-chats are flying from
one block of granite to another, and the hawks are
hovering in the sky, on the look out for an imprudent
foird, the weirdness of the place can look almost attractive.

Not so Princetown itself, though it seems to be regarded
as a sort of watering-place, and two or three large fishing
and pleasure parties were lodging there. It certainly is
the dreariest of bleak neighbourhoods, surrounded by
formal patches of land cultivated by the prisoners, studded
with the various signal-posts whence the escape of a con-
vict can be at once announced to other stations, and gene-
rally enveloped in an atmosphere of fear and gloom.
Even the houses are tarred outside in so slovenly a
fashion that they seem to have black, gigantic, dripping
fingers closing on them from above, with the view of
snatching them away to the bottomless pit. The inn was
full of the dreary pleasure-parties when we arrived, and
the landlady had to get us a bed out, which, as it was
both wet and cold, was not very delightful. However,
she said it should be clean, but when we arrived at the
lodging at half-past ten, we found that the women of the
house had retired, and that the sheets had certainly been
used some dozen times before. There was nothing for it
but to pull them off and wrap them up in a corner of the
room. Even the floor was so doubtful that one made
islands for one's self to tread on in it, and for blankets we
used our own wraps. The dogs slept well, and so didA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

3*9

Cecilia. But for me, I confess,—partly, perhaps, because
I had got nothing but a bank or shoal of some ridgy-
substance which appeared to be granite, in the so-called
mattress, to sleep on,—the night was as weary as it was
cold. Confused pictures of "the Claimant" " retiring
behind a sapling" to weep,—they say that he is in-
distinguishable in size from any other prisoner now,
and that the sapling might really hide some of him,—
voices asking me if " I should be surprised to hear " that
there would be an explosion of paraffin gas shortly before
sunrise,—a horrible paraffin lamp diffused its odour
through the house,—vague remembrances of the scene in
the Essex marshes in " Gfreat Expectations," where Pip
meets the convict, and is threatened with fearful conse-
quences if he does not stock his boot with bread-and-
butter early in the morning,—and a ghastly impression
that a jury of fishes, with a great flatfish for a judge,
had found me guilty of a frightful act of vivisection,—
rendered my sleep that night certainly a great deal more
disturbed than that, I should hope, of most of the convicts
in the neighbouring prison.—I am, Sir, yours, &c.,

Your Last Year's Correspondent.IY.

OIR,—As far as we have seen it, the only wasty and
desolate part of Dartmoor, the only part where
there is little grandeur and no beauty, though much
dreariness, is that chosen with considerable fitness for the
site of the great prison. As you approach Princetown
from the Ashburton road the desolation begins, and as
you leave it by the Tavistock road it vanishes. The
great sweeps of yellow gorse again relieve the eye, the
finely-marked lines of hill and valley reappear, and the
road, as it zigzags down the slope of the first broad basin,
accompanied by the telegraph posts and wires, would
resemble greatly the road over the lower spurs of the
Alps,—over the Arlberg, for instance, from the Lake of
Constance to the Tyrol,—but that the depth of the
colours, the mingled heather and gorse which inlay it,
give it an aspect of greater beauty and less wildness.
About four miles from Princetown, we passed on our
left one of the most curious of the granite piles which
lend Dartmoor its air of solemn yet grotesque antiquity.
The Sphinx Rock is on the hill called' Yixen Tor, the
Devonshire world being divided, I suppose, whether the
likeness to the female fox or the Sphinx be greatest,—A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.	321

but from the Tavistock road the resemblance to the
Egyptian Sphinx is most impressive. The face of the
Sphinx is* turned towards the west, on which she
appears to gaze, " with the same earnest eyes, and the
same sad, tranquil mien," on which Mr. Kinglake has so
powerfully discoursed as belonging to her great Egyptian
prototype. One never thinks of a Sphinx without
thinking of Lord Beaconsfield, and at the present
moment a Sphinx seated on Yixen Tor seems especially
symbolic of that at once mysterious and mordant states-
man. But thinking on Lord Beaconsfield and his
Sphinx-like career, my mind wandered into a sudden
emotion of surprise that the Jews, in their spasmodic fits
of Egyptian idolatry, had not, instead of borrowing from
Egypt the meaningless calf, rather taken the Sphinx,
which at least appeals to those forebodings of a mys-
terious destiny of which life is so full, as well as pre-
senting a distinct object to the imagination and the
senses. Or may it possibly have been that in the latter
idolatries they did include the Sphinx,—that it was the
Sphinx to which Ezekiel alludes when he tells us that
after being brought in vision to Jerusalem, " to the door
of the inner gate that looketh towards the north," he saw
at the entrance " the idol of jealousy which provoketh
to jealousy,"—a passage which is usually explained as
meaning, not that the idol in question represented
jealousy, but that it was one which especially " rivalled
God and provoked his jealousy." Certainly the image
which " Eothen" describes as bearing such awful sem-
blance of Deity, in that it watches "like a Providence"

YA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

over all the vicissitudes of races and generations, " with
those same sad, earnest eyes, and the same tranquil mien
everlasting," might well be described as rivalling God
and provoking his jealousy in a sense in which golden
calves, or even images of Baal and Astarte, could never
have provoked it, because such an idol would have
appealed to that adoration of mystery and serenity
which is indissolubly blended with true religious awe.
Assuredly even this rude and accidental resemblance to
the Sphinx, fashioned in granite, as it gazed solemnly at
us, as we drove along the side of the opposite hill, gave
us a better glimpse into the possibility of the old ido-
latries than all the Pantheon of Greece, even if chiselled
by Phidias himself, could have secured for us.

As Dartmoor has its reminder of Lord Beaconsfield, so
it contains too, very near to it, a reminder of his chief
opponent, as he was pictured by that mordant wit.
Coasting the moor northwards from Tavistock, we came
upon that singular little " exhausted volcano,"—as the
geologists regard it,—called Brent Tor, with the quaint
little old church, called in the old Latin Chronicle St.
Michael de Rupe, which stands in the green cup on its
summit, which was once, I suppose, a glowing crater.
The Tories, perhaps, would require that the church
should have been swallowed up by the volcano, rather
than erected upon its verdant crater, before they would
accept the symbol for Mr. Gladstone; but Mr. Gladstone
himself would probably accept the figure as it is, as
better expressing the drift and consequence of his policy.
Certainly the perfect little cone of Brent or Burnt-outA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.	323

Tor, and the strange little church which stands in the
crater at the top, like the cup in a saucer, are as striking
after their fashion as Yixen Tor and its rude granite
Sphinx themselves; and the prospect from them is, as
is fitting, if you accept the symbolic meanings, far
grander,—a perfect panorama of tors springing out of
the wild moor, with the blue range of Cornish hills
stretching away into the far distance on the western
horizon. Probably the Tories would add that the deli-
cious mushrooms which grow in such profusion on the
sides of Brent Tor add another characteristic feature to
the symbol of the Liberal leader and his policy, but I
doubt whether anything half as good grows on the side
of Yixen Tor, though I should expect that there might
be found there unedible funguses in multitudes. Ah,
those were indeed rare and delicate mushrooms which
dappled the sides of that fair green cone, with its heart
of red jasper and volcanic ashes. The same afternoon
we saw the beautiful cascade formed by the silver torrent
of the Lyd as it winds and slides down a reddish rock,
110 feet in depth, which interrupts its course, the whole
framed in the dark background of the pine-woods,—
we saw the deep-set narrow gorge, 80 feet in depth,
over which, one midnight, when the bridge had been
carried suddenly away, the horse of an unconscious mes-
senger from Tavistock is said to have taken him at a
bound, without his discovering till later what peril he
had escaped; but it was not till the skilful landlady of
the Dartmoor inn brought us into the cosy chimney-,
corner of the spare kitchen in which she lodged us, with324

A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

its shining dresser and its rambling cupboards, and those
marvellous mushrooms, toasted with a little dash of
butter and pepper, that the perfect ideal of the tender-
sublime rushed upon our imaginations. Surely that
flavour had been maturing for centuries in the heart of
the mighty mother. Like the silver thread down the
great rock, that delicate stream of rare essences had
descended from the primeval ages, to dash itself, in a
moment of glosso-pharyngeal ecstacy, as Mr. Alexander
Bain would say, against a twig of the ninth pair of
nerves in our organization ; and the result was that emo-
tion of the tender-sublime on which I have descanted.
Why has no one ever defined man as the mushroom-
appreciating animal ? " Phoebe Junior " delights in a
carrot, and exults over an apple, but turn her out on the
moors of her ancestors, and she would never be known to
eat a mushroom, still less, even if she did, to recognise
that strain of ethereal rapture which it strikes out of
properly organised glosso-pharyngeal nerves.

Our Dartmoor journeyings were now virtually at an
end. We drove the next day to Okehampton, the pic-
turesque and quaint little town which Mr. Kingsley has
so unjustly vilified as " an ugly, dirty, and stupid town,
with which fallen man (by some strange perversity) has
chosen to defile one of the loveliest sites in the pleasant
land of Devon," and were wonderfully struck with its
beauty, cleanliness, and charm. The bright stream over
which you pass into its broad and pleasant street is
spanned by a pretty antique bridge, at the side of which
three broad steps are placed for the girls who fill theirA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.	325

pitchers with its water. This broad main street is broken
after a while into two branches by the church, which
is built right on to a little gabled shop two or three
centuries old, while above the town towers the high,
moorland and the magnificent pile of the ruined castle.
What a. world for the painter is that ruin! Here pyra-
mids of mossy wall, from the topmost stones of which
seedling oaks are starting up unconscious of their doom,—
there the solid masonry of the banqueting-room, and the
unroofed dungeons, no longer dark, and looking perfectly
harmless, which must have been the witnesses of so much
pining and so much dread. "We had never seen in a ruin
more impressive windows than still remained perfectly
defined against the blue sky. The woods, too, amidst
which it stands are magnificent, while the mountain
stream of the West Ockment, running through a lovely
ravine immediately at its base, separates it from the
heights of Dartmoor. Of all the little towns which edge
this delightful moor, Okehampton seemed to us far the
most charming. Moreton-Hampstead, much bepraised
by the guide-books, is common-place in the comparison.
Here we left Dartmoor, putting Phoebe Junior in a horse-
box, and taking train for Barnstaple, with a lovely
crescent moon, over the higher curve of which a splendid
planet hung as it were suspended, looking in at the
window of our carriage as the train wound along.

From Barnstaple we drove over the lower spurs of
Exmoor,—which I had a great desire to compare with
Dartmoor,—to Simonsbath; which is, indeed, across the
borders of Devonshire, and situated, like the farmhouse326

A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

which is made the chief scene of Mr. Blackmore's story of
" Lorna Doone," in Somersetshire. This was an anxious
drive, for there was only one inn on the way,—against
which we were warned, as a bad case of fever had just
occurred there,—and the accommodation at the close was
very doubtful. From a little village of rare beauty on
the Devonshire side, disfigured by the hideous name of
" Higher Knacker's Hole," the road mounted for many
miles, passing over the spurs of Span Head, and leaving
behind us the richest conceivable view of the estuary of
the Taw, till at last we began to descend on the romantic
yalley of the Barle, where thick plantations of fir line
the steep slopes of Exmoor, and the river itself, with the
tributary streams by which it is fed, make a network of con-
verging ravines of singular beauty. The clouds had been
lowering all day, and had we been unable to get shelter
at Simonsbath our situation would have been uncomfort-
able, as Phoebe Junior had only obtained a slight refection
of meal and water at the hands of a woman on the way,
thereby making her nose so mealy that in the absence of
any regular appliances I had to wipe it with a super-
annuated pocket-handkerchief; the rain was beginning,
and the next inn was five miles off. Nor is the house at
Simonsbath a regular inn. It is a house of entertain-
ment, tolerated by Mr. Knight, on whose property it is,,
on condition that no beer or spirits are sold there, but
with few rooms, which are often full. We were lucky
enough, however, to obtain rooms, as well as a most
hospitable reception, and found ourselves at once among
the dramatis personce of " Lorna Doone." Our landlord'sA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.	327

name was Fry,—and like John Fry in "Lorna Doone,"
his hair and beard were of a sandy red,—and his next
neighbour, a farmer, was a Mr. Ridd or Redd, who must
have been some relative of the giant hero of that tre-
mendous tale. The weather became so broken that I
could not verify the geography of " Lorna Doone," as I
had hoped, and missed even the mysterious water-slide in
the Badgworthy river by which John Ridd first found
his way into the robber's fastness. But while we were at
Simonsbath I found out the gully of Cloven Rocks, into
which Carver Doone, after his attempt to murder Lorna,
was pursued by John Ridd mounted on Kickums, in the
somewhat melodramatic catastrophe of the tale, and saw,
I believe, the site of the Wizard's Slough, into which
Carver Doone, tossing his arms wildly to heaven, was
sucked up, after his death-struggle with his foe. Alas !
a great part of the gully of Cloven Rocks is now enclosed,
and a good farm-house stands at the entrance; and the
"Wizard's Slough, though still boggy enough, has, I sus-
pect, been drained. But Exmoor is still singularly wild,—
much wilder, I think, than its grander southern neigh-
bour, for it is less broken into separate hills, and has
more of the continuity and loneliness of a single stretch
of moorland. The tortuous Barle, which is its southern
boundary, is, I should think, as solitary a river as could
be found in England, though pedestrians can now cross
it at intervals of a mile or so by light plank bridges, sup-
ported on piles of moss-covered stones. Here and there
it sinks into pools of great depth, such as that which has
gained for the village the name of Simonsbath, a pool3? 8	A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

with, winch very tragic stories, both old and new, are
associated. As we watched the sunset one evening over
this romantic treach of the river, I thought we had never
seen more inextricably mingled aspects of loveliness and
eeriness. At first the sinking sun was softened by a haze
which gave it the gentle lustre of intensely brilliant
lamplight, which was reflected in the river at the bottom
of the ravine, while a spot of more lurid red hung over
the fir-woods on the bank opposite us. Then, as the sun
sank, the clouds lifted a little, leaving a clear streak of
gold and crimson sky, with heavily-frowning masses of
cloud above, while the converging ravines grew darker
and more ghostly, and even the cattle drew together as if
for company. The close of some old rhetorical period of
Macaulay's,—which runs, I think, thus,—" were it the
wildest scene which, ever Salvator peopled with outlaws,
or the loveliest over which Claude ever poured the mellow
effulgence of a setting sun,"—kept ringing in my ears,
for the scene was the latter when we first began to watch
it, and the former before we turned away.

I must not dwell upon the remainder of our journey.
We dr.ove across Exmoor to Lynton, and a wilder drive
is hardly to be conceived; indeed, it becomes exquisitely
beautiful, as the sea at the mouth of the Bristol Channel
begins to glisten behind the magnificent belts of purple
heather which line the northern slopes of the moor.
Descending into Lynton, even with the drag, was a work
of difficulty to Phoebe Junior, for the carriage often
seemed to be really hanging directly over her, so steep
and even precipitous is the road. Later in the day, in aA DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.	329

hired carriage, we dashed down the same road at a rate
of astonishing rapidity, which seemed to us to be regu-
lated mare by the laws of falling bodies than by those of
voluntary motion. Almost every one knows Lynton and
Lynmouth—that beautiful pair of towns, the one hanging
directly over the other, each of which not only supple-
ments the other's beauty, but adds greatly to the other's
charm,—so well that they need no description of mine.
I think them the most lovely places in England, so
various and contrasted are the kinds of beauty which the
grand cliff-scenery and the wild romantic glens, belong-
ing equally to each, afford. It would be difficult to find
nobler cliff-walks nearer than the cliffs of Moher on the
coast of Clare, or the cliffs of Slieveleague on the coast of
Donegal. It would not be easy to find more romantic
glens and waterfalls nearer than the glens of Wicklow or
of "Westmoreland. Near Lynton and Lynmouth both are
contained within the distance of a few minutes' walk.
Moreover, the sea-view of Lynton has this great charm,
that you not only have a magnificent range of cliffs
beneath you, but a lovely distant shore—the south coast
of Wales—bounding the prospect, of which just enough
is seen to excite the fancy, and lend richness and depth
to the shadows and lights on the horizon.

Our little journey was nearly at an end. On the day
we left Lynton, after giving Phoebe Junior "a leader"
up the steep ascent of the foreland, I drove her through
driving rain and a tempest of wind across Exmoor to
Porlock, and just at the point where the redoubtable John
Hidd's father must have been murdered by Carver Doone,A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

a danger of a milder kind awaited us. Phoebe Junior,
treading delicately, like Agag, the King of the Ama-
lekites, down the red and stony slopes of that tremendous
hill, turned her foot upon a stone, and could hardly use it
at all for many minutes. We were more than a mile,
and a very precipitous mile, from the town. The rain
was falling heavily, though rainbow after rainbow spanned
with low flattened arches the lovely bay of Porlock, and
steeped the grand headland before us in its soft colours;
the dogs, dyed deep with the hue of the soil, which made
them as rosy-fingered as Eos herself, barked disconsolately
for shelter,—and I began to despair of getting the dear
little horse to the inn. However, the sprain turned out
only temporary, and in a few minutes she was able to
move on without difficulty, though not quite without
lameness, and both Porlock and Minehead were reached
at last.

And then came the parting. Up to the last moment I
had half contemplated buying Phoebe Junior. But it was
not possible, without either shooting or selling an old
horse which I had not the heart either to shoot or to sell,
for any one who would buy her would certainly work her
beyond her strength. Yet it was a great wrench to part
with Phoebe Junior. We had never passed her stable
without hearing a neigh of welcome. She had never
fallen, and never but once shied, and never turned slow
or sulky. Even " Old Caution," an admirable old horse
which we had used among the Yorkshire hills, though
her superior in strength, was not at all her equal in
docility and companionableness. It was a sad parting.A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

33*

We separated amidst the confusion of the elements at the
railway-station on the beach at Minehead. The long
breakers were rushing in in lines of angry foam. The
hurricane was blowing down the trees in the little boule-
vard which connects the station with the town, as Phoebe
Junior, with that perfect aplomb which never deserted
her, entered her box to return to Exeter. Cecilia placed a
roll of bread she had just purchased for her on the board
before her, looked wistfully, like the hero of the " Senti-
mental Journey," at the little arrangement she had made,
and gave a sigh. The porter closed the box, and we saw
her no more. In anguish of heart, I burst out with the
lamentation of the hero of " Locksley Hall,"—

" Oh my Phoebe, slender footed, oil my Phoebe, mine no more !

Oh the dreary, dreary moorland! oh the barren, barren shore !"

And indeed she deserved our regrets. "We had still our
Nancy and our Blanche. But all hope of a pony as fault-
less as the trap, of durable tranquillity, of temperate
trotting, was shut up in the box with Phoebe Junior.
A stronger foot than hers carried back the chaise, when
at length it arrived by the Great Western train. As
quick an ear as hers watches for the kindly steps which
bring the horses food or drink at night. But it is when
to the ordinary traffic of the quiet country roads, suc-
ceeds the noisy glitter of the soldiers or volunteers who
come to be reviewed on our secluded green, it is when the
gigantic traction-engines that strike panis into our old
Nancy's soul, threaten our new basket-work with destruc-
tion, that Cecilia misses the sobriety, the self-command,332

A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.

the perfect soundness of judgment, the perfect rectitude
of intention, to which the history of our draught-horses
furnishes no parallel, or furnishes a parallel in " Old
Caution " alone.—I am, Sir, your Obedient servant,

Your Last Year's Correspondent.

[This is going too far. Our graceless correspondent
has not only parodied the Poet Laureate, but para-
phrased Lord Macaulay's eloquent tribute to Hampden
as a patriot and a statesman, in his panegyric on Phcebe
Junior; nay, he has substituted the name of an old York-
shire horse for that of the Great Liberator of the United
States and the Father of his people. But for an old and
kindly feeling for our correspondent, which betrays us
into weakness, we must have cancelled the latter part of
this letter; as it is, we cannot let its gross flippancy pass
without severe rebuke.—Ed. Spectator.']

the end.

PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND CO., LIMITED, CITY ROAD, LONDON.2 Vols., demy 8vo, 24s.

ESSAYS,

THEOLOGICAL AND LITERARY,

BY R. H. HUTTON, M.A.

Revised and Enlarged. With a new Introduction on the Religious Difficulties

of the Times.

CONTENTS.

Vol. I. (Theological).
The Moral Significance of Atheism.
The Atheistic Explanation of Religion.

Science and Theism.

Popular Pantheism.

What is Revelation ?

Christian Evidences, Popular and Critical.
The Historical Problems of the Fourth Gospel.
The Incarnation and Principles of Evidence.
M. Renan's " Christ."

M. Renan's " St. Paul."

The Hard Church.

Romanism, Protestantism, and Anglicanism.

Vol. II. (Literary).

Goethe and his Influence.

Wordsworth and his Genius.

Shelley's Poetical Mysticism.

Mr. Browning.

The Poetry of th$ Old Testament.

Arthur Hugh Clough.

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold.

Tennyson.

Nathaniel Hawthorne.

" Mr. Hutton's additions to this edition of his ' Essays ' are so substantial that he may
be said to have embodied in his two volumes a new book. They are full of fifte thought
and suggestiveness. . . . The volumes will gain what they richly deserve, a high place
in English literature."—British Quarterly Review.

DALDY, ISBISTER & CO., 56, LUDGATE HILL, LONDON.]3Prmnt=BaB papers. jfourti) anlr JftW) partes.

CATHOLIC THOUGHTS ON

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST AND THE
CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

CATHOLIC THOUGHTS ON

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY.

BY THE LATE FREDERIC MYERS, M.A.,

PERPETUAL CURATE OF ST. JOHN'S, KESWICK.

Crown 8vo, 7s. 6d. each.

" Have yon ever seen ' Catholic Thoughts,' by the late Mr. Myers, of
Keswick, two privately printed volumes, one on the Church of Christ and the
Church of England, one on the Bible and Theology ? Very remarkable,
especially as written 1834—1848, containing the largest views now urged by
any of us, put out by a devout Christian Churchman."—The late Dean
Alford.

"We have long been acquainted with Mr. Myers's admirable Lectures on
Great Men, but it was from the present volume we first learnt that Mr. Myers
was a great man himself. Certainly he was great in the width of the survey
which, as revealed in these ' Catholic Thoughts,' he made of the history of the
world; great in the clear and satisfactory estimate of the forces which were
contending for spiritual mastery in his day as they are in our own; and great
because of the patience in which he possessed his soul as he looked onward
to the issue of the struggle. The world is under great obligation to the late
Bishop of Argyll for rescuing the 'Catholic Thoughts' from relative obscurity,
and giving them publicity with the sanction of his name. . . . They will
become a valued and permanent possession."—Spectator.

"It seems unaccountable that a book containing so much powerful and
suggestive thought on the ecclesiastical questions that have been agitating
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MEMOIR OF
NORMAN MACLEOD, D.D.

BY HIS BROTHER, DONALD MACLEOD, D.D.,

One of Her Majesty's Chaplains.

With Portraits and'numerous Illustrations, 2 Vols, demy 8vo, 26s.

TIMES.

"We once more commend to our readers a work which is a fitting
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PALL MALL GAZETTE.

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SATURDAY REVIEW.

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CHURCH QUARTERLY REVIEW.

"A really good book. . . . We would venture earnestly to commend
it to the consideration of the English clergy. . . . Brave and tender,
manful and simple, profoundly susceptible of enjoyment, but never preferring
it to duty; overflowing with love, yet always chivalrous for truth; full of
power, full of labour, full of honour, he has died, and has bequeathed to us,
for a study which we hope will reach far beyond the bounds of his communion
and denomination, the portrait of a great orator and pastor and a true and
noble-hearted man."

WESTMINSTER REVIEW.

" The life of a thorough man . . . with boundless fun there is always
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DALDY, ISBISTER & CO., 56, LUDGATE HILL, LONDON.2Sts3jop ®Tjulfoairs Mcntams.

BISHOP THIRLWALL'S
LITERARY AND THEOLOGICAL REMAINS

EDITED BY THE REV. CANON PEROWNE.

Vols. I. and II., CHARGES. Demy 8vo, 32s.

TIMES.

" Bishop Thirlwall was not only foremost in the intellectual ranks of the
clergy, he was, by almost universal consent, foremost in the intelligence of
Great Britain. ... In these ' Remains ' of his authorship, as they are
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instead of complaining we have not more, we may be thankful that we
have gained so much. . . . The volumes form the most complete record
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ecclesiastical history during this memorable epoch."

STANDARD.

"Taken together they form a complete commentary on the ecclesiastical
history of the present reign, nor is there a single question of importance
which has arisen during that period which they do not notice and elucidate.
Their literary merit is remarkable, and to all lovers of conciseness, purity, and
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ACADEMY.

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GUARDIAN.

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occurrences is of inestimable value. It will be abundantly furnished in these
two volumes, which ought to be carefully and thoughtfully studied by every
Churchman who would attempt to realise the dangers of our present position."

INQUIRER.

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permanent value as a contribution to the history of recent theological
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Vol. III., MISCELLANIES, will be published immediately..

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