little light refreshment for the middle of the day could' be deposited in the satchel before starting after breakfast. As to the "provender" abroad, the tourist might fare well with little outlay, except in the matters of peas, potatoes, and pies, the first being invariably sweetened; the second drowned in fat; and the third entirely devoid of substantiality. Take, for instance, the table-d'hote at the Hôtel de la Couronne, at Chamouni :-soups, fish, eight dishes of meat, with appropiate vegetables; fresh and dried fruit, a pint of iced vin ordinaire; sweet pudding, tarts, and confections; all for two and a half francs, or about 2s. of our money! In summarising, the lecturer said he should have liked to narrate how oddly he fraternised with a Hampshire man, who loomed before him from a ravine, like a spectre, when he was contentedly consuming mountain strawberries and cream in a rude châlet in the Oberland, a man after his own liking, from whom, however, he was suddenly parted in cloud-land, never to see him more! He described the unearthly_aspect presented by Mont Blanc, in the evening, from Geneva, sixty miles away; the concentration of grandeur and sublimity at Chamouni; and yet how charming, on his return, did our own English, southern scenery appear-as perfect, in quiet beauty, as what he had recently beheld, was magnificent and sublime; never before had he realised so fully the power and fulness of Scott's sentiment:

"Breathes there a man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,

"This is mine own, my native land!'
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned,
From wandering on a foreign strand!"

He spoke of the eagles kept at Geneva, and the bears at Berne, at the public expense; of the ancient semireligious signboards placed over the inn doors, especially

in the Canton of Basle, one of which (when translated) curiously reads thus:

"Wake, and repent your sins with grief;
I'm called the "Golden Shin of Beef!"

And another:

In God I build my hopes of grace;

The "Ancient Pig's" my dwelling-place!

Of the numerous legends, too, attaching to almost every noteworthy natural object in Switzerland-how Saint Martin, a holy giant, in order to free the waters of an accumulating lake high up amongst the mountains, seated himself upon the Mettenberg, and the depression of his seat is still to be seen and how one vast fragment of rock, around which the road winds in the fearful St. Gothard Pass, was dropped there by Prince Lucifer, who was conveying it through the air for the purpose of demolishing a certain church; and thus derives the name of Teufelstein, &c. &c. He referred to localities connected with the painful history of the Albigenses and the Vaudois; also to the habitudes of Tell, Winkelried, Zwingle, Rousseau, Byron, &c.; describing, too, those streams which are made to labour as well as laugh;—and "travellers' books," kept at the various roadside inns-manuscript scrap-books, full of ugly blots, spleen and sentiment, oddities and contradictions, pen-and-ink landscapes and pencil profiles, bad writing and elegant caligraphy-some of them, too, more replete with virtuous precept than a copybook! He treated, also, of the various moods and inconsistencies in which the mountain air constrained him to indulge-how, sometimes, his earnest apostrophe would partake of a strain like the following:

"Antimony of entities sublime!

Flux and reflux, still struggling out of time!
Potential offspring of the slumberous deep,
Awake, and rally from your fearful sleep!
Dark correlates of the untrodden hills!

Syncategorematic heavings of the earth!
Transcendent reticence of demons' mirth !
Abnormal pedigree of mortal wills!

Strike your vast cadence to the empyreal blue,
And raise the echoes of incorporate air!"

be"

Or how (especially when gently sauntering along, in the "meek evening," by the banks of Ticino or Leman, after a substantial repast) the "towsy-mowsy" or the sentimental would get the upper hand;—or how, when more light-hearted and buoyant than ordinary, he would sing to the diapason of the pine forests and the waterfalls, so many snatches of songs, running one into the other with such wilful carelessness, that (as Albert Smith puts it) the "brave old oak' would perpetually be "getting upstairs" on the "banks of Allan Water," and prevailing upon somebody to "drink to him only with their eyes,' as he struck "the light guitar," and exclaimed, "pop goes, &c." "all the day, in the Bay of Biscay, oh!" allowing, meanwhile, the "bumper toast to go round!"-He showed the vast difference there was between a book knowledge of people and places, and that derived from actual observation; and was eloquent in praise of foot travelling as superior to all other modes of thoroughly seeing a country, or enjoying an excursion; of the general voice of nature, when the morning is up, when the woods are awake, when the trees shake off their dewy tresses, when the feathered songsters break forth into their matin hymn, and all nature leaps with a new life:

"Though sluggards deemed it but a foolish chase, And marvelled men should quit their easy chair, The painful way, the long long league to trace,Yet there was sweetness in the mountain air, And life, that bloated ease could never hope to share!"

The lecture abounded in exquisite bits of description, to which we have not, in giving the above outline, been enabled to do justice. We therefore subjoin, as an

illustration, Mr. Hill's graphic description (vide July 14)

of his

UNUSUAL ASCENT OF THE RHIGI.

It had rained all day, and I had pedestrianised dismally across a shoulder of the Albis range, and beneath the laden cherry-trees on the banks of the Zuger-See; but when near the Chapel of St. Adrian (where fell the warning arrow, shot by Henry Von Hunenburg from the Austrian lines into the confederates' little camp), "the windows of heaven" were closed, and the western firmament-it seemed almost miraculously-speedily became effulgent in crimson and burnished gold. A strange whim took possession of me-no less than leisurely to ascend the Rhigi during the night, and arrive at the summit on the morrow, in time to witness the very first solar beams fall upon the wondrous panorama of mountain-peaks thence visible, but in respect to which disappointment is so often in store for the tourist, as to have given rise to the following monody:

"Nine weary uphill miles we sped,

The setting sun to see:

Sullen and grim he went to bed,

Sullen and grim went we!

Seven sleepless hours of night we passed

The rising sun to see:

Sullen and grim he rose at last,
Sullen and grim rose we!"

It was dusk when I passed through Goldau, of intensely melancholy associations-(I believe I endeavoured to do so stealthily, so that no one, native or tourist, might witness and report my mad freak)-and commenced the ascent. My knapsack-though it did not, like Albert Smith's young man's, contain a pair of skates, for use on the glaciers; a large earthen bottle, to hold warm water in case of spasms; and 2lb weight of jujubes, to lubricate the throat!-was, nevertheless, uncomfortably heavy, and necessitated frequent haltings on the part of its bearer. The Rhigi is about 5,700

feet altitude, and I might have progressed one-third of the way to the summit, when heavy clouds suddenly obscured the sky (only hitherto visible here and there through the foliage of the forest through which I was passing), and I missed the path. Hearing "the noise of many waters" in various directions, and feeling with my mountain-pole strange inequalities in the ground, I thought it would be most prudent to await the daybreak (horrible thought! four weary hours!) in that precise spot. This thought forthwith became a determination, which was patiently carried out, though not before I had enveloped my framework in a capacious plaid, and carefully ascertained the limits of my verdant prison (which had a large-girthed tree in the centre) to be about four yards square. It was a darkness "which might be felt;" and from ten until two my watch, cigar case, and lucifer repository had little rest. What a multitude of thoughts do crowd upon the mind of a man placed in such circumstances! I felt no fear-wild animals of a harmful kind had long since disappeared from those shades; and, indeed, so noisy were the winds in the branches, and the waters in the ravines, that had I possessed the voice of a Stentor, I could not have been heard by such even had they existed; therefore, as I paced to and fro, I indulged in recitations and small vocalism, relieved by reflections on the fearful tale connected with the Rossberg opposite; on comfortable logement, and the fact that my maternal parent was not aware that I was out;" on the folly of getting up to see the sun rise in general, but more particularly of staying up and out all night in order to catch his early beams; and of a thousand other things. I dared not sit or lie down, for my book knowledge informed me that, in the event of my doing so, I should sleep, and probably awake stiff, if I was permitted to unclose my eyes at all. However, at last I saw a star, and then a glimmer, and in twenty minutes more I was again ascending. Until considerably after three did I plunge uphill,

66