A DREAMER ON THE RIGI.
[TO TH8 EDITOR OF THEI " BMWTOR. "] Sin,—" A Traveller," who figures in the Spectator of the 7th current, has evidently been dreaming on the Rigi. I am also apprehensive that he is a somnambulist, and has been walking in his sleep from the " Kaltbad " to the Kulm. It is a mercy that he was not precipitated down the steep incline which the pathway skirts on the opposite side of the mountain. Travellers, especially dreamy travellers, often see strange things, or in their dreams have "strange bedfellows." Such were evidently the associations of your dreamy correspondent, who fancied himself amongst a company of "Mr. Cook's excursionists," whose characteristics he attempts to delineate. Facts demonstrate the imaginary idealism of the ugly picture which he has sketched. First, a hundred of "Cook's personally-conducted tourists" have never been up the Rigi together during the season. The highest number was about sixty, who made the ascent with myself in July, and I would venture to back any one of the threescore for good behaviour and polite manners against this libeller of his countrymen. Secondly, there was no " personally-conducted" party of mine up the Rigi in " the early days of last month." Thirdly, my " personally-con- ducted" parties are generally the best behaved of English tourists, their social compact tending to rub off asperities and teaching them practical lessons in good manners, from whose example this con- temptuous traveller might profit, were he to open his eyes and honestly look at facts. The representations of this traveller har- monize with the dreams of French journalists, who last month reported my pocket to have been picked in Paris, at a time when I was in Southern Italy, How of ten do such dreamers fabricate facts which belong to the " region of imagination" !—I am, Sir, &c., Tourist Office, 98 Fleet Street, October 11. THOMAS Coox.
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