ere thousands of tourists find shelter during the
summer nights, and among them is one of the finest hotels in the world.
When fall comes, all the landlords must take their families and move down
from the mountain, as it would be impossible to keep the track of the
railroad clear during the winter to bring up the necessary provisions for
them. The snow is often from 10 to 20 feet deep on these Alps.

All Swiss scenery, whether one is on the lakes, upon the mountains, or in
the valleys and ravines, is singularly charming, and bears no resemblance
to the scenery which one sees elsewhere; so that for this lack of having
something with which to compare it, no one can do it justice in any
description short of a volume. The reader will therefore pardon our haste
in this country. One who sees the rest of Europe and not Switzerland, will
not miss any particular links in the historic chain of social, religious
and political development of the human race, but he will not have seen the
sublime in nature. The Alps are the poetry of inorganic creation, and a
week or two spent on their lakes, in their valleys and gorges, amid the
high waterfalls or upon their snowfields and glaciers, teaches one to
associate new meanings to the words, grand, sublime, lofty, inspiring,
overawing, romantic, wild, precipitous and bewildering, &c. It took me two
days to ascend as high as the Rhone glacier, during which time I walked
over 30 miles up hill along old military roads which the Romans
constructed through Switzerland. I saw the snow and ice on the first day
already, and it seemed as if I was but a little below it, but in place of
reaching the snow line in the afternoon as I judged I might, I did not
reach it until the next afternoon at 5:00 o'clock. The valleys are narrow
and the mountains rise in some places almost perpendicularly at the sides,
so that the snow and ice which melts near the tops of the mountains, falls
down thousands of feet into the streams below. Water-falls that are from
several hundred to a thousand feet in height are numerous among the Alps.

The Giessbach Falls which I ascended on the 6th of September, descends in
a series of seven cascades 1,148 feet, and the Handeck Falls, which I
passed on the 5th, precipitates in an unbroken sheet from the height of
250 feet! Rainbows stand over all the falls of the Alps, whenever the sun
shines.

On the second day (Sept. 4th) of my ascend of the Alps, I could look
upwards and see th