gle a
while longer, until at Airolo, at the foot of St. Gothard, where we
stopped at 10 o'clock for the night, though the valley forks and is
consequently of some width, there remain only a few slender
potato-stalks, in shivering expectation of untimely frost, a patch or
two of headless oats, with grass on the slopes, still tender and green
from the lately sheltering snows, and a dwarfish hemlock clinging to the
steep acclivities and hiding from the fierce winds in the deep ravines
which run up the mountains. Snow is in sight on every side, and seems
but a mile or so distant. Yet here are two petty villages and thirty or
forty scattered dwellings, whose inhabitants keep as many small cows and
goats as they can find grass for, and for the rest must live mainly by
serving in the hotels, or as postillions, road-makers, &c. Yet no hand
was held out to me in beggary at or around Airolo.

ST. GOTHARD.

We did not start till after 9 next morning, and meantime some more
Diligences had come up, so that we formed a procession of one large and
heavy, followed by three smaller and more fit carriages, when we moved
out of the little village, and, leaving the larger branch of our creek,
now a scanty mill-stream at best, to bend away to the left, we followed
the smaller and charged boldly up the mountain. The ascent is of course
made by zig-zags, no other mode being practicable for carriages, so
that, when we had traveled three toilsome miles, Airolo still lay in
sight, hardly a mile below us. I judge the whole ascent, which with a
light carriage and three hard-driven horses occupied two hours and a
half, was about eight miles, though a straight line might have taken us
to the summit in three miles. The rise in this distance must have been
near five thousand feet.

For a time, the Hemlocks held on, but at length they gave up, before we
reached any snow, and only a little weak young Grass,--nourished rather
by the perpetual mists or rains than by the cold, sour earth which
clung to the less precipitous rocks,--remained to keep us company. Soon
the snow began to appear beside us, at first timidly, on the north side
of cliffs, and in deep chasms, where it was doubtless drifted to the
depth of thirty feet during the Winter, and has been gradually thawing
out since May. At length it stood forth unabashed beside our road, often
a solid mass six or seven feet thick, on either side of the narrow pass
which had been cut and worn through i