A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.—TI.

[To TAB EDITOR. OF THE " SFECTATOR.1 Belvoir Vottage, Wandsworth, October 8, 1867. Sin,—/ 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 aontiime to be if I am to be legible,—my eldest Stands proudly by my side ; poor Edward is away, scribbling, I fear dismally, at his Office ; Hannah has just taken her Orders. for a nice Sirloin of beef with horse-radish sauce, Yorkshire padding, and an apple tart it six eclock,—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 realize the changes and chances through Which we have it last reached the haven where we (or at least 1,—I am not so sure of Edward) would be. Do you remember as Well, alas ! as I do, the first appearance of Rehm, 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 what 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, torsi 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 l" 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 Cat 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 Vashti's paled its ineffectual 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 con- cluding 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 dis- tance diminishes insensibly even the best servant's feeling of respon- sibility. Besides, as a matter of fact, it was during the extra holi- day,—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 homeward route, the more so as we travelled through a part of Swit- zerland which, though one of the grandest, every one now knows. From Char to Rapperschwyl, on the Lake of Zurich, we went by railway ; and my remembrance 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 took on and put 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 catne 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 trying to fancy them suddenly ducked. We evaded them, however, in the interim. We left the Lake of Zurich at Horgan, and took an Binspanner 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 companion- ship 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, through 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 Luberne 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 Habeas's, in the National Gallery. 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 attettpted to im- pose 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 bag- gage—a porter's knot—in the hands of the enemy ;—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 Pliatus,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 ragged 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 beauti- ful old covered bridge (the Capellbriicke) 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 in forbidding mourn- ing, 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 in- efficiency of old painters, and the imposition practised on their modern drawing - room taste by lovers of the picturesque. From Alpnach 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 mar- mots 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 vertical 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 nice 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 care- fully 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 humanized 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 before such an ogreish wretch as that. When Alpine strawberries 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 humiliated 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-country- men, 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 con- science-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 sensitive consciences, 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 Garden show, by those vulgar red and green and yellow lights. How different they were in the morning 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 to bend downwards for its two hundred feet descent till it is already far 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 Resurrection 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 Eger, on our way from Reichenbach to the Schiedeck. 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 Schadeck; gave me the most impressive conception of the over- powering massiveness of the Alps, as the towering white Jungfrau, 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, amazed" by the grand- eur of the Oberland, I almost felt as if in the beauty of grandeur Eastern Switzerland, and especially the Bernina Alps, had the ad- vantage. There was 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. It is difficult to get anything like the same varieties of colour and form, within the circle of any one horizon. For airiness of snblimity, 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," 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 Languard. We injudi- ciously 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 leas obviously a petticoat. I wanted to turn back at once, but Edward, who was as much alarmed as I, insisted that it was all the guide's carelessness, and that he would now be warned. Soon after, how- ever, 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 further, 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 Eisnzeer we did succeed in climbing on foot, in spite of all our failures, and that alarming "near vicinity of an abyss" with which Beideker threatened me :— " Potent was the spell that bound me, Not unwilling to obey ;

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

It was indeed a sweet blue ether, which seemed to penetrate 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 sunset on the Lake of Thum, more than realizing the dreams of Swiss lakes which those painted Swiss brooches of my childhood had conjured up in my childish imagination ; 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 picturesque 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 Tolling clouds of dirty smoke ; of the blurred lights of Dover Har- bour 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 streaming 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 Cohn!

"These three made unity so sweet,— My frozen heart began to beat • With something of its ancient heat."

—I am, Sir, &c., A WIFE NOT ON HER TRAVELS.