Part I. 



A LITTLE TOUR IN THE ALPS. 



85 



of Pine woods above and among them. Others still higher, and 

 with the verdure less visible, are behind, and above all a great, 

 bony, steep-scarped, dark range stretching all across the view. 

 The hollows between the angular-pointed ridges are white with 

 vast fields of snow, while others seem variegated with it in 

 narrower bands, against the dark framework of the mountains. 

 Clouds cap this far-off region — round, high, silvery clouds, con- 

 trasting with the deep blue sky above, and the wide range of 

 mountains with the deep snow-seams down their dark sides 

 below. A few minutes afterwards a break has occurred in these 

 great " cloud-lands," and something reveals itself among them 

 lit up with the hues of the silvery woolpacks around, and 

 yet not of them, for there is here and there a dark spot suggestive 

 of solid earth, and you ask yourself, can it be that that is a 

 mountain ? Yes, that is the tall old father of all the magnificent 

 mountains around, his head silvery with age, while his eldest 

 sons are merely beginning to show the silver here and there, and 

 the younger ones have not a trace of anything but the fresh hue 

 of youth. 



The indescribable variety and beauty of the country traversed 

 on descending the other side of the Salfeve, and the margins of 

 calm, blue, celestial-looking Lake Leman, with vast ranges of 

 snowy mountains beyond its broad expanse, give the young 

 traveller a very rose-coloured 

 impression of the Alps, 

 which forty-eight hours' jour- 

 ney from Geneva was quite 

 sufficient to modify in my 

 case. The country has every 

 conceivable variety of attrac- 

 tive pastoral scenery, and, 

 better still, the human beings 

 in it seem to partake of the 

 felicity which appears to be 

 here the lot of all animated 

 nature. Their cottages and 

 houses, nestling in nooks in 

 the sweetest of flowery fields, 

 and carved out of the abundant wood ot the region, snug gar- 

 dens, fields of emerald green, vine-clad slopes, happy-looking 

 villas, numerous flocks, and high ridges of. mountain-lawn, with 



57. — Castle of Chillon. 



