THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF A HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.

M.—VEVEY TO SIXT.

Sixt, September 21, 1868. SURELY there is no more curious working of the human mind than that which gives rise to the varieties of costume, and to the most opposite varieties sometimes in such close proximity to each other. An old master of mine once maintained that the words for " good " and " bad " in all languages are identical in root, (I forget the exact philological reasoning, but it somehow connected the Latin words for 'bad' and 'worse,' malus and pejor, with the roots of the Greek words for 'better' and 'best,' ccatindy and garrerei-,), and this he used to explain humorously by assuming two hostile savage tribes separated by a river. Whatever the one thought good, the enemy thought bad, till at last the word for 'good' on one side of the border came to mean 'bad' on the other, and vice versa. I was reminded of this enterprising philological feat when we passed from the Canton of Vaud to that of the Valais. In Vaud we had seen the peasant women with sugar-loaf straw hats, closely resembling the most perfect of their own conical peaks, and possibly imitated from them. As we sat by the Lake of Geneva at Bouveret, wondering how long it would take the Rhone to push back the bright blue waters at our feet another mile or two with its delta of yellow sand, as it has already pushed them back through the distance between "Port Valais,"—now a port no more,—and Bouveret, a figure emerged from a train just arrived from the Valais and stepped on to the steamboat, on which my wife gazed in dumb astonishment for a minute or two, before she drew my attention to the wonderful head-dress up- reared upon it. It looked at first like a tin pot of the shape of a carpenter's paper cap, but on more deliberate inspection I should say it was rather an irregular seven or eight-sided solid (a heptahedron or bctohedron) than a cube ; and I suppose its metallic appearance was given by silk, or shiny paper, stiffened with pasteboard, and not by any film of actual metal. The head- dress in question was the colour of bright japan metal, striped with brilliant blue, and a clumsier penthouse I never saw. It was most of all, perhaps, like an ornamental dog-kennel in miniature., or a doll's bureau, executed in japan metal ; but we saw these structures afterwards in Champery in all colours, black as com- mon as any, a colour in which they looked at once lugubrious and hideous. What can induce any one to wear such things? Fashion, of course ; but what can cause the fashion? Our "chimney-pot" hats are nothing to them. If, indeed, we wore hats representing chimney- pots, with all those remarkable appendages—" cowls," are they not

capriciously termed ?—added to chimney-pots in order to prevent the chimneys from smoking, there might be some analogy. But even then we could scarcely imagine women making life hideous by adopting them. These women of the Valais are no doubt victims of tradition and public opinion. But the origin of such a tyrannical tradition, the fountains of such a depraved public opinion, deserve special investigation. Was it originally a sort of challenge to the sugar-loaf hats of the Vaudois women ? Did this truncated pyramid bid defiance to the hostile straw steeples, by emulating the maximum of contrast ? Or was it originally a copy of some famous bastion which had been successfully defended by the Canton of Valais against the Canton of Vaud? Or could we perhaps suppose them intended to assert the " manysidedness " of women's brains asagainst the Vaudois upward-pointing spire, which seems to symbolize, for women, a life only of reverence? Even so, irregularity would be a mistake, as equal development on all sides would be of the essence of this symbol of manysided energy; and I

fancy, too, that the conflict of women's rights has never been sharply waged in these latitudes. It must remain, I suppose, one of the many enigmas of the most enigmatic of arts—dress.

From Bouveret the train carried us to M.outhey, and there a very modest carriage took us on board for the journey up the wild Val

d'Illiez to Champery. Winding steeply through rich orchards and chesnut woods, strewed with great boulders of rock, and leaving the striking mountains studding the bed of the Rhone to engrave their bold outlines on the blue background, we wound slowly along a narrowing valley till we were exactly opposite to, and I suppose within easy rifle shot of, the great jagged row of molar teeth which form the crest of the Dent du Midi. The mountain itself rises to an absolute height of above 10,000 feet, and nearly 7,000 above the high valley in which Champery lies. This great mountain, with its bare precipices ; its gullies filled with snow, which, lower down, turn into torrents, dividing as with so many white threads the green face of the mountain as they fall ; with its high-perched alps, on which the chalets are like dolls' houses and the cattle are hardly visible to the naked eye ; with its dark fringe of fir forest half-way down, and its turbid glacier-stream boiling along the bottom of the glen and separating it from Champ6ry, is, of course, the one object which fills the eye and the mind of every stranger in this wild but somewhat monotonous vale. The terrible-looking double teeth which run along its summit from east to west terminate in a westerly peak of much more shapely form, over the shoulders of which a necklace, or rather, say, a smooth white cape of glacier, droops in graceful folds on every side. This glacier, Lesauf, as it is called, though by no means comparable to any of the finer glaciers of the Alps, is, by very reason of its small scale, more picturesquely folded round the single peak in which it originates than any other I have seen. The system of the larger glaciers is so great that they embrace many summits instead of one before their separate ice-streams meet ; and usually they do not meet again, but only ray out from their common source in arcs of various curvatures, like the various jets of spray from a single fountain. But this little glacier, springing from behind this western summit of the Dent du Midi, takes no wide sweep ; its two branches soon meet again in front of it, and then spread down over its shoulders. This slender peak, with its graceful and glistening cape of ice, flanked by the higher, more rugged, and jagged heights further to the east, and divided only by a break in the chaiu from a dark and solid mountain mass spotted here and there with snow further to the west, used to exert a singular fascination over us, as we took our evening stroll above Champery towards the Col de Cou. We sat listening to the noisy torrent, fed chiefly from that white, still glacier, which rushed wildly down the intervening glen and filled the whole ravine with its impatience, though not, however, quite able to drown the melancholy rustle of the fir trees above us, or the striking of the Champery clocks below, with eyes fixed on the glimmering white mantle of the dark peak opposite, till the rushing in my ears ceased to resemble an angry and noisy torrent, and was transformed into the voice of the glacier telling the secrets of its mute and frozen centuries. If you Hate% intently in the stillest midnight you will hear something like a rushing sound,—a sound as of distant wings,— which my wife always insists in her paradoxical way on calling "the silences ;" and so, on the other hand, some of these monotonous mountain torrents in a still night, issuing from sheets of snow that glimmer as tranquilly as the grave, seem to me to pass into the mind and memory, not as natural music, but as floods of silence. I suppose this is the same train of feeling as that which made Plato say in the Pitted° that death feeds life, just as life feeds death,—a fancy of which these still glaciers and their tumultuous children often remind one. Anyhow, though I don't wish to grow fanciful or sentimental, I shall not soon forgot the intensity of silence which seemed to me to fill the Aral d'Illiez on these evenings at Champ6ry, though the torrent made far more noise than that song of Wordsworth's " highland lass" whereof he said,— " Oh, listen, for the vale profound Is overflowing with the sound!"

And yet, on the whole, we did not greatly enjoy Chainpory. The hotel there is more of a pension than a hotel, and, moreover, the manager was ill, and the concern badly ordered.

There were no bells in the roouus,—only one in each corridor, and when you wanted your bath in the morning, you had to rush out some thirty yards with a counterpane round you, and with English ladies lodging in perhaps every other room of the corridor, to ring a bell which usually produced no effect except the vibrations upon your own ears. Then they didn't put your room to rights till about dinner-time, and in bad weather, when your choice is between your room and a salon full of people you don't know, and with whom you are compelled to make helpless attempts at acquaintance, it is a trial to have to choose between unmade beds and unmade friendships. We were fortu- nate enough, indeed, before we left, to find some very pleasant friends' friends, with whom we had many common interests, and

who broke the spell of that reiterated attempt and deadly failure to converse. But in the meantime, the English colony was a

nightmare, and if we had not been detained by indisposition,

we should have fled almost immediately. There were the same faces and the same jokes day after day. There was a

wee boy at table, and there was a good-natured gentleman opposite who always put on the same jocose face and asked the same question as to whether he was going to leave him

(the jocose gentleman) any pudding, day after day, till I felt

disposed to begin dinner by begging him to say it at once and get it over. Then there was great routine joking about the victuals, which were not perhaps of the best,—especially

I remember a custard pudding in which the predominant taste', was cardamums and castor-oil. Our only pleasant acquaintances

having left the very day we made each other out, we were quite morbidly eager to leave, and one very misty morning, the moun- tains being quite invisible, and a small rain falling, I had con- fidence enough in the barometer, which had risen for twenty-four hours, to order mules, and solemnly depart amidst the pitying comments of the English company, who peeped at us compassion- ately from the windows and balconies.

My faith in the barometer was fairly rewarded. Before we reached the top of the Col de Con the sun was on the mountains behind us and the broad valley more than half cleared of mist. But the cold at that height was excessive, and no restauration, however stately, was ever so welcome to us as the dark little hovel ou the summit, with its hot coffee and open fireplace. As we descended the beautiful basin below the Col de Cou,—as far as that break in the moun- tains which is called the Col de Goleze leading to Samoens and Sixt,—the afternoon brightened, and the Dranse, which was running far beneath us, shone out in parts like silver. But what bogs we had to traverse ! The heavy rain bad saturated the turf, and turned a thick fir wood, through which our road lay, into a great dismal swamp. My boots had long been walked into holes, but the mule was obviously so uncertain about his footing with me on his back, and remonstrated by so many grunts, that I dismounted at once, and unfortunately so did my wife. Very soon, however, with petticoats as clammy as if they had been put into a clay pit, and boots soaked with mud, she had to climb up again, the guide

gallantly allowing her to put her clay-modelled foot into his hand. As for me, I dashed onward, through the wet gratis where it was possible, through the marsh where it was not, till boots and trousers alike were neatly cased in clay, and did not get up again till the mules overtook me in climbing the Col de Celiac. As we passed the summit, a short and sharp shower ushered in the softest and brightest evening of the week,—and what a lovely scene lay before us! To our left the grand perpendicular precipices of the Goleze, rising many hundred feet above the great height at which we were; before us soft green slopes stretching for miles, but divided towards the bottom of the valley by a huge and steep rocky hill, blackened with thick fir woods, to the right of which lay Satnoens and to the left our road to Sixt. On the other side of the bright valley of Satnoens and Sixt, the mountains rose up again, crowded with dark fir forests. As we got nearer the valley, passing into it through a narrow rocky pass, the loveliest of waterfalls, flushed with the recent rains, came into view on the opposite mountain beyond the Giffre ; and soon after we had turned into the valley and begun ascending the course of the Giffre, the great Pointe de Sales, with its lofty head pushed forwards till it seemed to jut right over the bed of the river, though many thousand feet above it, shut in the southern horizon.

How glad we were to reach this quaint old convent, which is now the principal inn in Sixt,—the Hotel du Fer-k-Cheval, as it used to be called, from the horse-shoe valley about four miles above, the Hotel des Cascades, as it is called, with even greater appropriate- ness, now. It is the most hospitable of inns, the open stone hearths admitting of that greatest of luxuries, a blazing wood fire, the long corridors speaking of its old conventual days, and the old- fashioned frescoes round the walls of the rooms, with processions of birds flying formally, two and two, and diminishing by regular steps from the size of eagles to the size of sparrows, calling up faint reminiscences of the Noah's arks of one's infancy. Yester- day, thoroughly rested from our labours, we spent in exploring some of the exquisite waterfalls of the valley, and the strange natural amphitheatre of rock a few miles above us. The valley abounds in waterfalls of every kind, all now full with the rains. Water falling more than a thousand feet with a widely-scattered, fan-like spray,—water bounding in great, long, fierce almost horizontal leaps, looking like a staircase of very low, broad, white, boiling steps,—water descending in a single thread- like column for hundreds of feet, then divided by a rock into separate falls, finally changing its course altogether, and shelving away in broken rapids to the valley,—all these varie- ties, and many varieties of these varieties, have we seen in this wonderful valley. But after all, these shining waterfalls are only the gems in which greater beauties are set. We have seen nothing in Switzerland grander than the amphitheatre of rock,—or cirque, as it is called in the Pyrenees,—which they term the Fer-k-Cheval. Sheer limestone precipices of many hundred feet, (over which my wife counted no less than fourteen waterfalls, all visible at the same moment), shut in a gigantic amphitheatre of soft green turf, —swelling into green hills round the base of the rocks where land- gips have repeatedly fallen from above. Behind these gigantic precipices, again, great mountains tower up, of which the Pic de Tinneverges, and the 'fête Noire are the most magnificent ; and at one point the great glaciers of Mont Ronan peep over, just suggest- ing the desolation and grandeur of the wild plateau between the summits of the rocks and the base of the higher peaks. I could fancy that it might have been in such a scene as this, which looks like the vestibule of a higher world, that Jacob, his eyes just closed on ladders of rock which seem to lead from earth to sky, and on delicate clouds of spray floating for ever, like angels' wings, around them, might have dreamed that wonderful dream which Rembrandt has conceived and painted for us till we seem almost to dream it ourselves, from which he awoke saying, "How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven."

A WORKING MAN IN SEARCH OF REST.