260 
EXCESSIVE COLD. 
litter-carriage the only modes of travelling at that .season of the 
year. But the Prince has an English chariot, which he always 
uses in summer, the roads being then in a condition to admit its 
progress without impediment; and, I am told, he travels in it at 
a rate equal to any expedition of the kind in Europe. He is 
particularly fond of its seclusion and celerity. 
This day was more intensely cold than the preceding, because 
its extreme degree of frost was accompanied with a terrible wind 
from the east, which, in our line of march, blew almost direct in 
our faces. It is not the simple degree of cold, which in general 
occasions the fatal catastrophes, I have described a few pages 
before ; these bitter winds are the assassins of life. They blow 
with a suddenness, and a fierceness, of which we, in more western 
climates, can have no idea; rushing down the long valleys be¬ 
tween the snow-cased mountains, like streams of pointed ice, 
penetrating every pore, freezing the blood, and feeling to congeal 
the very brain. When I experienced all this so severely in my 
own person, I could not but commiserate those of the weaker 
sex, who were exposed to such pitiless elements. The custom 
of the country makes such exposure a necessity ; or, rather, the 
mountainous surface of the country, by denying the practicability 
to these novice engineers, of constructing more commodious 
roads, has originated a custom, which habit only, to a woman, 
can divest of many horrors. It is at such moments, that a man 
appreciates the comprehensive value of European civilization, 
when he considers how it provides for every physical and moral 
want of humanity; how it subdues even nature herself; for no 
mountain-land, no waste wilderness, has ever yet been found to 
resist its smoothing footsteps. While I drew this comparison, 
so much to the advantage, not merely of European laws and regu- 
