below the very top of Monte Generoso.
There was a picture of it in the hotel at Cadenabbia, but this gave
but little idea of any particular beauty. A big square house,
with many windows, and the usual ladies on mules, and guides with
alpenstocks, advancing towards it, and some round bushes growing near,
was all it showed. Yet there hung the real Monte Generoso above our
heads, and we thought it must be cooler on its height than by the
lake-shore. To find coolness was the great point with us just then.
Moreover, some one talked of the wonderful plants that grew among its
rocks, and of its grassy slopes enamelled with such flowers as make
our cottage gardens at home gay in summer, not to speak of others
rarer and peculiar to the region of the Southern Alps. Indeed, the
Generoso has a name for flowers, and it deserves it, as we presently
found.

This mountain is fitted by its position for commanding one of the
finest views in the whole range of the Lombard Alps. A glance at the
map shows that. Standing out pre-eminent among the chain of lower
hills to which it belongs, the lakes of Lugano and Como with their
long arms enclose it on three sides, while on the fourth the plain of
Lombardy with its many cities, its rich pasture-lands and cornfields
intersected by winding river-courses and straight interminable
roads, advances to its very foot. No place could be better chosen for
surveying that contrasted scene of plain and mountain, which forms
the great attraction of the outlying buttresses of the central Alpine
mass. The superiority of the Monte Generoso to any of the similar
eminences on the northern outskirts of Switzerland is great. In
richness of colour, in picturesqueness of suggestion, in sublimity and
breadth of prospect, its advantages are incontestable. The reasons for
this superiority are obvious. On the Italian side the transition from
mountain to plain is far more abrupt; the atmosphere being clearer,
a larger sweep of distance is within our vision; again, the sunlight
blazes all day long upon the very front and forehead of the distant
Alpine chain, instead of merely slanting along it, as it does upon the
northern side.

From Mendrisio, the village at the foot of the mountain, an easy
mule-path leads to the hotel, winding first through English-looking
hollow lanes with real hedges, which are rare in this country,
and English primroses beneath them. Then comes a forest region of
luxuriant chestnut-trees, giant