vius, many years ago. We rose from dinner with sad hearts.

BULLE.

AUGUST 4.-We had a pleasant drive hither, although the weather was so cool that we were fain to get out and walk occasionally, to warm ourselves. All the peasants, male and female, that we meet to-day, have the head bound with a handkerchief of scarlet cotton-a pretty change from butterfly caps and round hats. This stone village of Bulle looks all Sunday, as to the business done in it. A great cart, loaded with some three or four hundred Gruyère cheeses, makes its slow way up the street; and far off, down in a smooth meadow, partitioned ready for a fair or cattle-show, women are hanging out dozens of those same scarlet handkerchiefs, which seem to light up all that corner of the landscape. Our dining-room is hung with the gayest Turkish paper, and on the floor under the table is a drugget, of one of the common patterns so often used for the same purpose at home. Wonderful, how so slight a circumstance transports us back at once, making nothing of that great ocean that lies between! Bulle will always look pleasant in memory from this little accident of association.

VEVAY.

THE drive from Bulle to Vevay is charming. It rained a little, so that we were obliged to have the carriage closed, and could not walk, as we like to do; but we read Childe Harold aloud, and got our ideas in order for Lake Leman, the approach to which is by a road of Alpine zigzags or tourniquets, constructed at the cost of great labor and outlay. The hill is faced with vineyards, so that as you look back and up—and to look back you must look up-you see only one green expanse, so steep is the acclivity. The town of Vevay, and some villages adjacent, are picturesque enough, viewed from these heights; but one looks beyond, to the lake, to the rocks of Meillerie, to Chillon, to the Alps, with intense interest; for Mont Blanc is yet unvisited, and poetry has bathed this whole beautiful scene in that purple light which no sunshine can bestow. We gaze and gaze, and desire to be allowed, silent and motionless, to bring together into one focus all the elements of the pleasure which such things give. But onward go the relentless wheels; slope after slope is passed; a pretentious villa, in high habitable order, meets us at one turn-a group of Cantonniers mending the road, at another; and soon we go clattering over the rough stone pavement of Vevay to an enormous hotel-the antipodes of romance and sentiment.

A great hotel is a good thing enough sometimes; in the main street of a great city, for instance, or when one

is travelling with a distant object, so that getting over the road is the sole affair. But one of these proud, cold, heartless, frivolous strongholds of all that is worldly, is the climax of impertinence on the shore of Lake Leman, whose charm lies in the holy quiet of Nature, in the associations of poetry, the idea of rural simplicity, the silent sense of God's presence and love. If one could only find lodging in some unpretending nook, where the spirit of the scene should be uncontradicted by all the indoor influences, how would the pleasure of a sojourn here be enhanced!

The vexation of such a position is to me indescribable. One cannot even stir out without encountering the least interesting people in the world; the long hours spent at table pass in the emptiest talk, or the most fruitless silence. If there were a hope that by outstaying this vapid company one could possess one's soul in quiet for a day, patience would be easy. But the certainty that to-morrow, if it bring change, will but render it necessary to become reconciled to new ills of the same sort, takes away all encouragement to passive endurance. I shall be as glad to leave Vevay, as I was desirous to see it. Not that I have a word to say against the Trois Couronnes, as a hotel. It is clean, and well enough ordered, in its way; and its immense corridors, and hard-to-find stairs, are incidental to its over-grown size. I detest the class, and only find this particular specimen especially disagreeable because it is an anomaly just here; an unscientific discord, which can never resolve itself into the harmony of heaven, in the midst of which it impudently stands. I longed to say with Dominie

Sampson, "Conjuro te!" and see it disappear into the earth. The only pleasant association I have with the Trois Couronnes, relates to the delightful lapful of letters which F. brought us from Geneva. We had been without news for a month. Who can tell the thrill which letters from homes across the ocean bring with them?

CHILLON.

ALL the romance that had been frozen, or forced back upon its source by that great solecism of a hotel at Vevay, began its natural flow again when we found ourselves in a comfortable open carriage, under a mild and cheering sun, on our way to Martigny, through a road which may truly be called one bower of beauty for mile after mile. But we could not help laughing when we read Byron's description of Clarens. If the "trees take root in love," they certainly have a very ordinary growth afterwards; and we sought in vain for "the young breath of passionate thought," among the men-women, who were toiling in the fields like beasts of burden, and the bluff men-men that allowed them to do it, while they stood smoking their odious pipes under every door-way. In truth, Byron raved about Clarens because Rousseau had raved about it before him; and Rousseau's descriptions of scenery are notoriously so imaginative that one is at a loss to trace, among the actualities of nature, a feature of what he saw. We hear of a fine, hearty old Swiss pastor at Montreux, who embodies our idea of that character

pretty well; but we have not seen him, nor indeed anybody else that interests us much.

The walls of Chillon gleam white, both in and out of the water, not far from Vevay. The castle stands isolated, and is approached from the land by a bridge and causeway, the water washing against its walls all round. Its appearance is not exactly according to the romance idea of an old castle; for instead of battlements we have high peaked roofs, over tower and turret, bartizan and wall. It is, nevertheless, a beautiful object, and in admirable keeping with the surrounding scenery, which has rather the softness of Italy than the frowning aspect we associate with castle-sites.

It is asserted that Byron knew nothing of the tradition which gives the castle so sacred an interest for the Swiss. He lived near the place, and visited it often. The prisons suggested to him the idea of a prisoner, and his touching story is the creation of his own brain and sympathies,— at least it is so believed in the neighborhood. The guide shows the great English poet's name cut in the stone pillar with his own hand, and declares that Byron used to come over from his house near Vevay, and spend two days at a time at the castle; but that the story of Bonnivard had no connection with the poem now inseparable from the gray towers. Be this as it may, the castle is a poem, according to the definition of certain schools. It is one of the few things of the kind that do not disappoint. It is in excellent preservation, and retains many marks of great antiquity. The real history of it is this :-Founded, as there is good reason to believe, in 816, it received large and important additions in 1238, in the reign of