146 



HA RD WICKE'S SCIENCE- G OS SIP. 



mountain roses. It would appear to be the kind 

 found by Professor Babbington in Cambridgeshire, 

 and re-discovered by Mr. James King in Ireland. 

 The dame is portly, and she hops but little, for it is 

 her happy lot to listen to that superb comb on her 

 partner's piston-like hind-legs, with which he gives 

 two strokes and a tremulous shake on the air-veins of 

 his wings and produces such a marvellous croaking 

 that you would think that you were listening to an 

 overture from the Mantuan cicadas, such as Virgil has 

 described. Let us put them up two and two into a 

 vivarium, and hunt for a young frog who may be able 

 to appreciate these goings on. 



Now that we are fairly rested we will enter the 

 brushwood again by this apparently very good road 

 swarming with tiger-beetles and fringed with the 

 queen of the meadow. The excellent road has 

 terminated at a projecting rock where somebody has 

 been cutting white-beam. A dark horror seemed to 

 brood in the sunny silence, for on such a spot a 

 woodman lately met with his death, and hark, there 

 is a scream ! As might have been surmised, an 

 attempt to scale the barrier leads to a crab-like 

 retreat, when the ark containing the innocent grass- 

 hoppers goes bowling down the slope like a racket- 

 ball. It is provoking to have to return to whence 

 one started, and lured on by some rods of purple 

 lettuce which looked fantastic ; here we are lost again 

 like the babes in the wood, and peering anxiously 

 over a stagnant pond fringed with dewberries, whose 

 acid fruit has done little to assuage our tormenting 

 thirst. Having passed the dismal swamp, we emerge 

 on to a slope darkly shadowed with wasp-frequented 

 pitch-firs, whose slippery needles render a scramble 

 up among the semi-defunct broom-rape most uncom- 

 fortable, and now we are arrested by another ledge of 

 rock. As we hesitate what to do, there appears, as 

 it were, a small gap above with footsteps in the 

 mire. With a shout of "Excelsior !" up we jump 

 like monkeys on to the smooth-worn limestone ledge, 

 our hearts beating audibly, and in we go at the 

 narrow opening, when we draw breath on rediscover- 

 ing ourselves surrounded with nut-bushes, where there 

 is a track leading upwards among the undergrowth of 

 wild raspberries and strawberries. Come and let us 

 sit and rest amid this dainty dessert and ruminate on 

 the road-intersected valley and blue and misty lake 

 spread like a map at our very feet. On the placid 

 lake there rests a speck of intense white, the noiseless 

 wing of a bark wafting building-stones to Geneva, 

 which, as seen from this eerie nook, appears to 

 huddle like a little village on its maternal lap of 

 blue. Building, for ever building like the wood-ants, 

 how different arise the mansions of to-day from the 

 Villa Diodati admired by our postillion-sporting 

 ancestors, whose grey walls, silent shrubbery, and 

 brown tiles, crowded on the field of the opera-glasses, 

 seem to recall the age of port-wine. But when you 

 do not know where you are, and only know what you 



are, it is no supreme happiness to muse thus over 

 crag and fell. So starting to our feet we push 

 onwards until a sudden blaze of green reveals that we 

 have passed all danger, for directly in front of us, on 

 the smooth grass, wiry with winged vetch-like 

 genista, and quivering with hair-bells, reposes the 

 turreted rock of the Pitons. " Is there any water 

 here?" we spontaneously shout to two maidens who 

 are catering for the haymakers. " Yes, straight up 

 under the rock," they answer. True enough a bloom 

 of purple horse-mint is there, and one can almost 

 hear a trickle into a hollow tree-trunk ; but wait a 

 moment, for here beside us is a small yellow tulip in 

 flower. 



Having drunk of the spring, there remains a little 

 beechen grove to track before we reach the crowning 

 hollow, wind-swept turret, around which is painted 

 in black, " Giavenna, 14 May, 1892." Here, 1383 

 or 1379 metres above the sea-level, we hunt in vain 

 for the eryngium, which, like the so-called sea-pinks, 

 decks many a mountain's brow, possibly the grinding 

 glaciers are explaining why, perhaps the seed-pecking 

 bird is saying how our ancestors came here to see 

 dragons, and to wonder why shells, other than 

 escargots, were found so high up : whereas time has 

 now made all this as clear as the names of the two 

 maidens freshly painted upon the rocky slabs, La Da, 

 La Lize, and Le Gil. Blithe were it to sit here like 

 them, and listen to the tinkle of the bells, and 

 bleatings of the flocks of goats. 



But see, the sun is already dipping to the purple 

 screen of the Juras. We therefore hasten down and 

 speed away over the grassy plateau to the hamlet of 

 La Croisette, where there flaunts a glimpse of the 

 Lake of Annecy. Insensibly, an orange glow has 

 flooded the western plain, where the sandy glacier- 

 fed Arve rolls its turbid ochrey stream to mingle with 

 the effervescent rush of the lake-fed Rhone that meets 

 it with a blue icy shimmer. Sweetest vale, 



" How calm could I rest, 

 In thy bosom of shade, with those I love best ; 

 When the storms that we feel in this cold world are past." 



Like the Kishon, nachel kadumin, the Arve would 

 appear to be a torrent under the direct command of 

 the suns in their courses, for was not the recent 

 sweeping away of the baths at St. Gervais nearly 

 contemporaneous with the blowing up of two steam- 

 boat boilers ? And, softly, do not the annals of its 

 inundations during the past century bespeak the un- 

 decimal periodicity of their phases — 1667, 1673, 

 1711, 1733, 1773, 1778, and 1787? 



It is a weird spot this where we are resting, for 

 here the scattered scrub of beech, and the worm- 

 tattered nut-bushes, present the fantastic forms of 

 their near neighbours, the junipers, from which the 

 last, certainly, in the glamour are undistinguishable. 

 Unearthly, like the imps on gothic spires, they seem 

 to be the torn banners of the heavenly host. Slowly a 

 herd of cattle, that would do credit to Nestle, come 



