s, valleys and lakes. The Oberland was grey and shapeless, the
Lauterbruennen valley chilly and threatening; even the divine Jungfrau
herself, when not altogether obliterated by the monotonous,
impenetrable cloud, loomed in steely coldness--"a sterile promontory."
Crossing the mountains from the Lake of Thun, we came to Montreux,
only to find the pearl-like surface of the great Lake Leman
transformed into lead. Not once in eight days did the celestial
fortress called Les Dents du Midi reveal its existence, although we
knew it was there, immensely high and remote, far away above the great
buttresses of the Rhone valley. So completely was it blotted out by
the conversion of that most excellent canopy, the air, into a foul and
pestilent congregation of vapours, that it was difficult to imagine
that it was still existing, and perhaps even glowing in sunshine above
the pall of cloud. Italy, surely, we thought, would be free from this
dreadful gloom.

The southern slopes of the Alps are often cloudless when the colder
northern valleys are overhung with impenetrable mist. In four hours
you can pass now from the Lake of Geneva through the hot Simplon
Tunnel to the Lago Maggiore. So, hungering for sunshine, we packed,
and ran in the ever-ready train through to Baveno. Thirty years ago we
should have had to drive over the Simplon--a beautiful drive, it is
true--but we should have taken sixteen hours in actually travelling
from Montreux, and have had to pass a night _en route_ at Brieg! A
treacherous gleam of sunshine lasting half an hour welcomed us on
emerging from the Simplon tunnel, and then for eight days the same
leaden aspect of sky, mountain, and lake as that which we had left in
Switzerland was maintained. Even this could not spoil altogether the
beauty and interest of the fine old garden of the Borromeo family on
the Isola Bella. Really big cypress trees, magnificent specimens of
the Weymouth pine--the white pine of the United States, _Pinus
strobus_, first brought from the St. Lawrence in 1705, and planted in
Wiltshire by Lord Weymouth--a splendid camphor tree, strange varieties
of the hydrangea, and many other old-fashioned shrubs adorn the quaint
and well-designed terraces of that seat of ancient peace. The granite
quarries close behind Baveno, and the cutting and chiselling of the
granite by a population of some 2,000 quarrymen and stonemasons, were
not deprived of their human interest by rain and skies more grey tha