THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF A HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.

IL—THE cot. DE JAMAN.

Vevey, September 14, 1868. WE left Thun, and especially its garden churchyard, with regret ; but as the time when we could seek rest there altogether was not yet, and the town below swarmed with tourists and pensionnaires, our regret was tempered with satisfaction at being once more insulated from that sense of restraint with- out companionship which an English entourage abroad with- out English friends always produces. It is fagging to over- hear such conversations as we heard at the table d'hôte here to-day,—which swarms with English. 'Where can I get young peas?' drawled a dejected American, I had them every day for three weeks in February in Algeria, really exquisite, and have never had them since.' 'Those waiters attend to every one but me,' complains an unprotected female on the other side of us ; garcon, apporte-z du. . . . du—I want some cucumber, cucumber, garcon,' which, as nobody at table had had any cucumber, and there did not appear any cucumber to be had, and the waiter did not know what the unhappy lady meant, and offered to take away her salmon instead of giving her cucumber, was one more added to the list of the good woman's special grievances. Well, this sort of thing is fagging ; it destroys all the freshness of travel, to have the old monotonies of national imbecility sounded every moment in one's ears. Foreign languages are at least an obscuring vapour which disguises the petty common- places of human nature, and gives a certain sense of fresh- ness and rest to life. And the worst of it is that it is only in the intervening spaces of travel, between one famous Swiss place and another, that one gets rid of this sort of chatter• altogether. Even seeing the little well known peculiarities of one's fellow-countrymen without hearing them is sometimes fevering work. A beautifully appointed grey suit, with a perfect wide- awake, and the usual cambric sail drooping in graceful folds be- hind, flashes past one in one of the loveliest perhaps of Swiss spots, and is followed close by a handsome striped lilac dress, straw hat, and fluttering white feather, surmounted by a brilliant parasol. The grey suit posts with hasty strides up to the principal point of view, dashes on to the next, flashes a glance to the right, to the left, does not tarry a moment anywhere, is swiftly followed by the striped lilac dress and parasol, and before you have quite realized where you are, much less had time to let the grand and rich scene before you sink into your visionary life, the parasol is rapidly sinking below the horizon in pursuit of the grey suit, having

" done " the view in 2007. minutes precisely. This sort of thing always tends to bring back again the intermittent fever of ordinary life, and we never enjoy ourselves so much as when we can give our fellow-tourists the slip for a day or two, as we did between Thun and Vevey.

The mists hung low as we left Than in the early morning by the post, and wound through the pretty Simmenthal towards Saanen. We had the honour.,—unknown to us at the time,—of dining with (I believe) the Duc de Chartres and his wife and little girl at Weissenberg. We notice that the travellers at the head of the fable were treated as if they sat at the dais and all the rest of the company below the salt, and that we did not uniformly receive even the same dishes which had been prepared for them. But we did not know till afterwards that the simple, unpretending- looking people who were so careful of their blue-eyed little girl were what their courier called "Prince and Princess of Orleans." We owed it to them, no doubt, that we had,—I believe for the only time in Switzerland,—true chamois meat for dinner. We several times had what was so called, but my wife, who has a finer taste than I, believed that on all other occasions it was only goat flesh with sauces made to give it a gamey flavour. The crumbs which fell to us, however, from the "Prince of Orleans's" table were, I believe, the true thing. And we had a sort of imbecile feeling that it was interesting, if not romantic, to eat what skips about in such extremely dangerous and picturesque places ; that we had gained a new step in life by eating it ; though in fact the wild, hunterish associations of the dish did not make it quite as good as English venison. How arbitrarily these sort of vague ambitions assort themselves to different persons ! I was amused to find that the republican Swiss pastor who was in the post carriage with us entertained precisely the same sort of feeling of having acquired a certain adventitious importance, which ought to have, but did not, make him feel altogether on a larger scale, by dining with the Due de Chartres, that we entertained from having con- sumed this somewhat rare, and particularly mountainous, food.

From Stumm the post did not go on to Vevey till the next morning, and as we did not care to go by that long and circuitous route, but preferred to cross to the Lake of Geneva on foot by the Col de Jaman, we acceptol the pressing offer of a very lively French voiturier to carry us on that night to Moutbovon, at the foot of the pass. And certainly, from that point to this, the whole route has been what Byron called it, "as beautiful as a dream." I sup- pose he meant so beautiful that one can scarcely believe the scene real, and fancies that at any moment a touch may awaken one to the ordinary common-places of life. At least, I doubt if I ever had a really beauti fill dream in my life, and from what I have heard of other people's dreams, I fancy dreams are much oftener grotesque than either beautiful or hideous. But none the less, all perfect loveliness does produce the effect of dreaminess on the mind. Is it because the images of a dream pass before one without any action or concurrence of one's own will,—which in sleep is in abeyance,—and that the same utter hush of our own restless, fussy, little individuality is caused by the passing of a. great number of lovely or sublime forms before us which we drink in solely through the eyes ? As we drove out of Saanen a misty and clouded day was clearing into a soft, brilliant evening. To our left the ragged Riiblehorn and the Chamois' Tooth (Dent de Chamois) rose up above the pine woods ; far beneath us, on the right, flowed the swift Sarine ; and behind us, in the far distance,

some great mountain,—I believe the Daube, the highest point of the celebrated Gemini Pass,—catching the setting sun, towered up a furrowed cone bathed in pale, soft flame. As we approached the Gorge de la Tine, a grand deep gorge like a miniature Ftinstermunz or a gigantic Matlock, one of the two horses in the carriage fell suddenly flat on his side close to the edge of an ugly enough precipice. Our chattering French driver—at Saanen we • passed again from the German-speaking to the French-speaking cantons of Switzerland—who had looked behind him to introduce to us the various mountains and other objects of interest much more than at his horses' feet, jumped down and helped his horse, which was not hurt, up again, and then immediately devoted himself to explaining elalsorately to us his own perfect freedom from responsibility for the accident. " Faites attention, Monsieur !"

(he had discovered that we only understood him by the help of the closest attention), "le clieval a mis son pied sur une grow pierre, une tres-grosse pierre," and so on,—the lively man, entirely undisconcerted, continuing, to my wife's dismay, to demand a great deal more attention from us than he gave, though darkness was falling fast, to his horses. However, we were soon safely in the pleasant Hotel de Jaman at Montbovon, talking our imperfect French to the most gracious of landladies, and explaining our need for a guide up to the Col the next morning. Lovely was the quince jelly with which that landlady,—that landlady alone hitherto,—graced her hospitable board, and pleasant were the dreams from which the howling wind and flapping Venetian shutters awakened us to fear that our expedition was hopeless ; but at five next morning, the benignant voice at our door pro- phesied "beau temps," and assured us that in all weathers the wind howled like that round the hotel at Montbovon ; so we were soon deep in the quince jelly again, and soon afterwards climbing or descending (for there was quite as much descending as climb- ing till we got close to the pass) the wet green meadows, or slipping along the stony mule path which leads from Montbovon to Allieres and the Jaman. At last, as we issued from a fir wood,

we saw to our left hand the striking mountain which Mr. Arnold has both sculptured and painted for us, in his beautiful verses, new and old, concerning the author of Obermann :— " But stop ! to fetch back thoughts that stray

Beyond this gracious bound, The cone of Jaman, pale and grey, See in the blue profound.

"Ali! Taman, delicately tall, Above his sun-warmed firs,

What thoughts to me his rocks recall, What memories he stirs !"

Subsequently, from the Lake here, we have seen, not the "cone," for that is rather a misnomer, but the tapering form

of Jaman "pale and grey, rise in the blue profound ;" but our first glimpse of him was of "Jaman, delicately tall, above his sun- warmed firs," for the early sun had just caught that unique shape, and caught it on the side on which the firs grow close up to the very summit. There are plenty of peaks and cones, and plenty of needles (aiguilles), among the Alps of the Canton of Vaud and of the Valais ; but we have nowhere seen another Jantan. Instead of rising like an ordinary conical peak from a broad base that may be roughly called circular, the form of Jaman (as it springs from the ridge, over which the Col de Jaman passes) is that of one of the old stone spear beds or javelin heads, which slope up, not quite into a point, but into a narrow end like the end of a chisel. So the Dent de Jainan, as it is called, —but it is too "delicately tall" for any tooth, even an incisor,—tapers up to a narrow but not pointed summit. The face which is turned towards the Lake of Geneva is bare and precipitous ; but the fir-clad sides are covered with soft turf as well as trees, and on that under which we passed it may be ascended by any one with good lungs in about an hour and a half from the top of the pass. Wherever Jaman is visible, as we have since found, even at this wonderful upper end of the Lake of Geneva,—

" Where the domed Velan, with his snows Behind the uperowding hills, Doth all the heavenly opening close Which the Rhone's murmur fills," the eye settles and rests upon him at once. There are scores of loftier and grander summits on every side, but he has the

stamp of highest beauty, the undeniable quality of "distinction." As we toiled up, in a sun now beginning to burn hotly, for it was

nine o'clock, towards the chalets of the Plan de Jaman, we heard voices eagerly answering each other from opposite sides of the glen, and soon afterwards the vehement barking of a dog. Our guide, with the most intense animation, told us that chamois had

just been sighted among rocks above the fir woods on the opposite side of the valley, and that two Swiss hunters were in pursuit. Soon we reached a chalet, where we were glad enough to rest awhile and drink the mountain milk and cream. What a picture it was! A smouldering wood tire sending up a cloud of blue smoke is burning on the stone floor of the dark little room ; round it a very handsome, frank-looking Swiss herdstnan, with his wife and two pretty children, are grouped, eating out of a round dish their breakfast of curdled cream ; these we join in attacks upon their milk and cream, while our guide tells them the evidently exciting news of the chamois, which they begin to discuss eagerly in very rapid and unintelligible French. Presently, when we had rested about a quarter of an hour, the two hunters with their guns and dog came in, hot and dejected. They had lost the track, they said, but their dog had overtaken one of the chamois,—which they supposed must have been sick or previously injured,—aud had been wounded by it, in proof of which they showed a hurt on the dog's head. The bunters, the herdsman, and our guide discussed the subject with all the excitement, far more than the earnestness, and probably much the same sort of fruitless result, as a knot of members in the lobby of the House of Commons display in discussing a minis- terial statement ; the dog stood by, wagging his tail and regarding himself as the hero of the morning ; while the goats peeped round the corner of the chalet to hear the news, and the cows in their adjoining shed gently tinkled their bells by way of a little musical accompaniment. By ten we were eating our lunch at the summit of the pass, where we were to part from our guide ; but we had not yet got our view of the lake below us. We were sorry to part company, for though our communications with the good Swiss were by no means of the freest, he had so kindly and simple a nature that kis society was very pleasant. It was very amusing to see him looking through my opera-glass. Ile had never: used one before in his life, and asked which end to apply to his eye. His delight was quite childlike. He laughed to himself perpetually, and kept saying, as

he caught each familiar object, " c'est tout pros," with a separate chuckle of satisfaction as he found the same effect produced in each separate case. Ile cannot have been a guide of the higher order, or the use of the telescope would have been perfectly familiar to him ; and I do not think he was. Still he had the slight hacking cough which almost all the professional guides seem to me to have. I doubt if any of their chests can stand for a whole life-time the exertion of daily ascents, often with consider- able burdens on their backs which necessitate a stooP.

A few steps downwards,—we were still directly under the stately head of Jaman,—and the most lovely landscape which either of us had ever beheld, I think, broke upon us,—the fresh, still, tender blue of the Lake of Geneva shining in the morning sun, with soft, little islands of feathery-white mist strewn over its surface, as well as over the bright green alps sloping gently at our feet; further off, where the lake widened out westwards towards Geneva, it was free from mist, but the blue shade of the water turned to white as it receded from the eye ; and then beyond Geneva, on the extreme western horizon, lay, almost like a bank of high cloud, the long chain of the Jura. It was the near end of the lake that was so exquisite a picture, and yet but for the air, and space, and light, and freedom of the almost sea-like western levels, with their comparatively low shores, it would not have had half the loveli- ness. Straight before us, range on range of mountains grew up in curious involution before the eye; there were the distant snows of the Great St. Bernard, the host of mountains which border the Valais, and at our feet the richly wooded rocks of Naye, and the shin- ing green meadows through which we had to pass on our way downwards to Montreux. I have never seen anything like the tender blue of the lake itself as it was then,—nearer, perhaps, to the delicate blue of very thin wood smoke on a bright day than any other tint I know,—but this was in such exquisite contrast with the curling white mist which floated upon it or rose off it in soft islands here and there, and the single whit:: sail which was skimming slowly over it, coasting the southern shore, and with the yellow sandbank stretching out into the lake near the mouth of the Rhone, that the tint seemed to us a perfectly new one, created for the sleeping lake beneath us, and proper to no other spot of sea or sky. We sat down on the warm turf among those lovely lilac crocuses which are at once the commonest and gayest of August flowers in the Alps, and dreamt of building us a chalet under the shadow of that spear-headed mountain, for indeed it seemed good for us to be there. We could not think with- out something like passion of Mr. Arnold's exquisite picture of the author of Obermann

"How often, when the slopes are green On Jaman, bast thou sate By some high chalet-door and seen The summer day grow late, "And darkness steal o'er the wet grass By the pale crocus starred, And roach that glimmering sheet of glass Beneath the piny sward, "Lake Leman's waters, far below, And watched the rosy light Fade from the distant peaks of snow, And in that air of night "Heard accents of the eternal tongue Through the pine branches play ; Listened, and felt thyself grow young, Listened, and wept—away!"

And away at last, we were compelled to go, down through shady woods, and hot shining meadows, and stony mountain roads, and pleasant orchards, till we passed the new staring villas of Glion, and were told by a worthy old Swiss woman -with a peaked straw hat, who condoled with my wife on her sore feet and long walk, that the wonder and beauty of the neighbourhood was the great

new hotel and pension Company of Glion (limited), which it would be well for us to take a carriage from Montreux expressly to see ! Before we reached Montreux, clouds were gathering heavily on the opposite mountains, and long ere we arrived here, the thunder rolled and lightning flashed, while

"That much loved inland sea,

The ripples of whose blue waves cheer Vevey and Moillorie,"

had turned black and white with storm and foam, and was tossing in that cruel mood in which it swamped a week later the boat of an English clergyman here, and swallowed up half his family before

his eyes. A WORKING MAN IN SEACII OF BEST.