dersteg, and turn down towards the more open face of a world so beautiful.

Our drive through the vale brought us full upon the view of the snowy Blumlis Alp at sunset. What a form of majesty and glory! How he flings the flaming mantle of the evening sun down upon us, as if he were himself about to ascend in fire from earth to heaven!

"So like the Mountain, may we grow more bright,
From unimpeded commerce with the Sun,
At the approach of all involving night.”

WORDSWORTH.

Nothing earthly can be more glorious than such a revelation. Meantime, as we rode into the twilight of the Vale, there came and went, between the trees and the mountains, through which we looked into the western heavens, a sky, that seemed for a season to be growing brighter, as we were getting darker, a sky, as the same Poet describes it,

So shone the Blumlis Alp. But we had hardly done admiring the crimson tints on that grand and mighty range, when turning from this valley and passing the lovely entrance of the Simmenthal, we came upon the borders of the Lake of Thun, and beheld suddenly the full moon rising behind the snowy ranges of the Bernese Alps, and gilding them with such mild, cloudless effulgence, that nothing could be more beautiful. They were distinct and shining, and so soft and white, so grand and varied in their outlines, that the sudden vision beneath the sailing moon seemed like a trance or dream of some eternal scenery. For the horizon, and the deep air above it, glowed like a pale liquid flame, and in this atmosphere the mountains were set, like the foundations of the Celestial City. Then we had the Lake, with the moonlight reflected from it in a long line of brightness, and amidst the beauty of this scenery, our day's excursion was ended by our entrance into Thun.

Now it would scarcely be possible in all Switzerland to fill a day with a succession of scenes of more extraordinary grandeur and sublimity, softness and loveliness. Gcd's goodness has protected us from danger, and shielded us from harm in the midst of danger, unworthy that we are of his love. How have we wished for the dear ones at home to be with us, enjoying these glories! And is not the goodness of God peculiarly displayed, in giving us materials and forms of such exciting sublimity and beauty to gaze upon in the very walls of our earthly habitation? What a grand discipline for the mind, in these mighty forms of nature, and for the heart too, if rightly improved, with its affections. These mountains are a great page in our natural theology: they speak to us of the power and glory of our Maker. And for the food and enkindling of the imagination they are in the world-creation what such a work as the Paradise Lost is in the domain of poetry; they are what a book of great and suggestive thoughts is to a sensitive mind; they waken it up and make it thrill with great impulses; and as a strain of grand unearthly music, a thunder-burst of sound, or as the ringing of the bells of the New Jerusalem permitted to become audible, they put the soul itself in motion like an inward organ, and set it to singing in the choral universal harmony.

We

The next day after this memorable excursion opened with a morning cloudy and misty, but it was clear again at ten. are at the Pension Baumgarten, in the picturesque town of Thun, under the shadow of a green mountain, with the Lake to the right, the town before us, and the clear rapid Aar shooting like an arrow from the Lake, under old bridges, and past houses and battlements, as the crystal Rhone from the Lake at Geneva. There are about 5000 inhabitants, with a noble old Feudal Castle of the twelfth century towering on a steep, house-clad hill in the centre of the village, and an antique venerable church nearly as lofty. From the church-yard tower and terrace, where I am jotting a few dim sketches in words, you have a magnificent view of the Lake and the Alps. Parties of visitors, most of them English, are constantly coming and going at this spot. The Lake stretches before you about ten miles long, between lovely green gardens and mountain-ranges fringing it, with the flashing

snowy summits and glaciers of the Jungfrau, Finster-Aarhorn, Eigher, and Monch filling the view at its extremity. On the plains of Thun the troops from the various Swiss Cantons are at this moment encamped for review, and passing through a variety of evolutions.

How like the first garden are the delicious vales and lakes hidden among the mountains! The Poet Cowley observes, as indicating to us a lesson of happiness, that the first gift of God to man was a garden, even before a wife; gardens first, the gift of God's love, cities afterwards, the work of man's ambition.

"For well he knew what place would best agree
With innocence and with felicity:

And we elsewhere still seek for them in vain,

If any part of either yet remain :

If any part of either we expect,

This may our judgment in the search direct,

GOD the first Garden made, and the first city, CAIN."

CHAPTER XIV.

Thun to Interlachen. Interlachen to Lauterbrunnen. Bible in Schools.

SEEING that I am to be a solitary pedestrian, from Thun through the Oberland Alps as far as Lucerne, my friend being bound homewards through Berne for England, I must make the most of this continued lovely weather; and since there is nothing in Thun to detain me, unless I were fond of looking at the crowds of gay and care-defying visitors, coming and going, in whom, being strangers, I feel no personal interest, and they none in me, I must even start to-day in the little iron steamer of the lake for Neuhaus. I could not persuade my friend to go farther, for he was continually thinking of his wife and children, looking towards home in just the state to have become a pillar of salt. Inwardly mourning, he dragged at each remove a lengthening chain. Besides, a careless herdsman on the mountains had struck him on the leg with a stone intended for one of his unruly. cattle, and he remembered, years ago, how one of his classmates, with whom he was then travelling in Switzerland, was laid on a sick bed for weeks, in consequence of a similar hurt not attended to. So between the sweet domestic fire-side, and the lame leg, he was compelled to turn his face homewards. I parted from him with great regret, and resumed my pilgrimage alone.

The sail from Thun to Neuhaus, at the other end of the Lake, needs the sun upon the mountains, if you would have the full glory of the landscape. For us it shone upon the Lake and on its borders, but on the distant Alps the clouds rested in such fleecy volumes, like a troop of maidens hiding the bride, that it was only at intervals the mountains were revealed to us. Landing at Neuhaus, you may go in a diligence, omnibus, hackney coach, mail carriage, or any way you please that is possible, a couple of miles to Unterseehen, a brown old primitive village;

and a little farther to Interlachen, which is a large English boarding house, with streets running through it, shaded with great walnut trees, and paraded by troops of dawdling loungers and lodgers, with here and there a sprinkling of Swiss natives. It is beautifully situated in the midst of a large plain, about midway between the Lakes of Thun and Brientz, both these Lakes being visible from a hill amidst the meadow behind Interlachen, with all the lovely intervening scenery and villages. Going from Neuhaus to Interlachen, you are reminded of the passage from Lake George to Lake Champlain. The verdure and foliage of the valley, to where it passes from meadow to mountain, is rich beyond description. It becomes really magnificent as it robes the stupendous mountain masses in such dark rich hues.

From Interlachen the way to Lauterbrunnnen lies through one of the most beautiful valleys in Switzerland. Entering it from the plain, we had a noble view of the Jungfrau rising with its eternal snows behind ridges of the most beautiful verdure, now veiled and now revealed from its misty shroud. The mountain torrent Lutschinen thunders down a savage gorge between forest-clad slopes and precipices, along which you pass from the villages of Wylderschwyl and Mulhinen for about two miles, when the valley opens into two deep ravines, one on the left, running to Grindlewald, the other on the right to Lauterbrunnen, each traversed by a roaring stream that falls into the Lutschinen. You may go either to Lauterbrunnen or Grindlewald and back again to Interlachen in a few hours, having witnessed some of the sublimest scenery in Switzerland; but the grand route is through Lauterbrunnen across the Wengern Alps, down into the valley of Grindlewald, and thence across the Grand Scheideck down into Meyringen, from whence you may go to the Lake Brientz on one side, or across the pass of the Grimsel on the other.

My German guide from Interlachen was very intelligent, and being an inhabitant of the village of Muhlinen, he communicated to us many interesting particulars. He told us of the schools of his native village, and among other things how each parent pays five batz, or fifteen cents, in the winter, and three in the summer, for each child's schooling, and how in the winter the children go