rpose, especially as the 'Ecu' at
that place was, in his eyes, a commendable hostelry. Some one in Geneva,
also, had believed that Couvet was as likely as anything else in the
valley; so at Couvet we descended.[49]

This is a very clean and cheerful village, devoted to the lucrative
manufacture of _absinthe_, and producing inhabitants who look like
gentlemen and ladies, and promenade the ways in bonnets and hats,
after a most un-Swiss-like fashion. They carefully restrict
themselves to the making of the poisonous product of their village,
and have nothing to do with the consumption thereof:[50] hence nature
has a fair chance with them, and they are a healthy and energetic
race. The beauties of the surrounding mountains, with their fitful
alternations of pasture and wood, and grey face of rock, are not
marred by the outward appearance, at least, of that which Bishop Heber
lamented in a country where 'every prospect pleases.' An old lady is
commemorated in the annals of Couvet as an example of the healthiness
of the situation, who saw seven generations of her family, having
known her great-grandfather in her early years, and living to nurse
great-grandchildren in her old age. The landlord of the inn informed
us, with much pride, that Couvet was the birthplace of the man who
invented a clock for telling the time at sea; by which, no doubt, he
meant the chronometer, invented by M. Berthoud. At Motiers, the next
village, Rousseau wrote his _Lettres de la Montagne_, and thence it
was that he fled from popular violence to the island on the Lake of
Bienne.

The 'Ecu' promised us dinner in half an hour, and we strolled about in
the garden of that unsophisticated hotel for an hour and a half,
reconciled to the delay by the beauty of the neighbouring hills, the
winding of the valley giving all the effect of a mountain-locked plain,
with barriers decked with firs. It will readily be conceived, however,
that three practical English people could not be satisfied to feed on
beauty alone for any very great length of time, and we caught the
landlady and became peremptory. She explained that dinner was quite
ready, but she had intended to give us the pleasure of an agreeable
society, consisting of sundry Swiss who were due in another half-hour or
so: she yielded, nevertheless, to our representations, and promised to
serve the meal at once. We were speedily summoned to the
_salle-a-manger,_ and entered a low smoke-stained wooden chamber