July 29.—My destination was the Grisons. I wished to see something of the aspects of nature and of the conditions of human life in that elevated region of central Europe. I arrived at Interlaken in the evening. It had been raining heavily all the afternoon. I found people complaining that the weather had of late been unusually cold and wet.

July 30.—Went to Meiringen to find a guide; or rather, as the excursion I was contemplating would not require a guide, one who might act as a light porter, and at the same time be in some sort a companion. On the recommendation of the manager of the Reichenbach Hotel, an acquaintance of the two last summers, to whom I had written requesting him to secure for me a good and true man possessed of these qualifications, I engaged Henri Leuthold, at a salary of 7 francs a day, which was to be raised by whatever amount I might think fair, when we had reached Pontresina, where living is dear, and guides are not fed and lodged by the hotel keepers, which is the practice at Meiringen, and many other places. This is a bad system, for, of course, the wine and bread and cheese given to the guide on arrival, and the dinner afterwards, are ultimately given by the traveller. It would be better for all parties in all respects, as we are now discovering at home, that all payments should be direct, instead of roundabout, and that they should be made in money only. Both the payers and the paid will, then, be making their calculations in one and the same denomination, and there will be no room for misunderstandings. It rained more or less all day.

July 31.—At 12 A.M. the rain ceased, and I at once started for Innertkirchen. Though so much rain had fallen, no sooner had it cleared up than, thanks to the natural underdrainage of the land which obtains throughout the greater part of Switzerland, the surface became clean and dry. In passing I looked into the structure of the Kirchet, that I might ascertain to what extent it is composed of old moraine rubbish and of rock in situ. As seen from the Innertkirchen side, it is clear that whatever there may be of the former can be only on its summit, for just below that you see the undisturbed stratification of the latter. I also looked at the existing deep and almost perpendicular-sided channel of the Aare to the right of the Kirchet, to judge whether it was due to a fissure of the mountain, or to the cutting action of the stream. I came to the conclusion that, though so deep and perpendicular, there is no evidence of any action but that of the latter cause. It is quite clear that the channel in its lower part, and for some way above the water, is entirely due to the recent erosion of the stream. This being undoubtedly the case so far, we have only to suppose that the cutting action of the water, which is now going on before our eyes at the bottom of the ravine, formerly in remote times had the same effect. What is now being done at the bottom was once being done at the top; and so throughout from top to bottom. The stream did not acquire its rock-excavating power recently. It would be illogical to ask for some other agent, when we find one quite adequate for the work that has been done, now doing precisely similar work on the same spot. Work, too, of a more or less similar kind, together with the presence of the same agent, is seen in every ravine in Switzerland. We may, therefore, be sufficiently certain that the whole of this deep perpendicular-sided channel was cut out by the existing stream. We need not postulate an earthquake, or rend the mountain by any other means. On the face of the ravine there are no ruggednesses and no projections, excepting where pieces of rock have been thrown off by the action of frost. You know that they have been thrown off because the face of the rock is in these places less weather-stained, or wholly unstained. Had the ravine been a rent, there would probably, in whatever way it had been caused, have been many projections, and much inequality of surface. On the other side, however, a question may be suggested at this spot. The face of the mountain on the west side of the bed of the old lake is cut down very precipitously. How was this done? It could hardly have been the work of running water, for it is continued from the top of the mountain down to considerably below what was the level of the old lake. This may be due somewhat to glacier action, somewhat to the action of frost, and somewhat to the wash of the lake as it was subsiding. But whatever might have been the way in which this was brought about, it does not affect the question of the channel.

In the afternoon made a call on an old acquaintance at Unter Urbach, one of the four villages in the old lake bed, which form the commune of Innertkirchen. I found him, though a porter, yet the proprietor of nearly four acres of good prairie. This land had been bought out of the savings of his earnings as porter. First one acre was purchased. That first acre was the great difficulty, for when it had been obtained, money could be raised upon it to buy another piece. When that been paid for partly by the good man’s earnings and partly by the produce of the first piece, a third piece could be looked out for, and so on up to the whole of the four acres, every subsequent purchase being more quickly cleared than its predecessors. I heard the same story of another acquaintance I had at Wrickel, the village in the north-west corner of the old lake bed. Indeed this effort to acquire land is the mainspring of the life of the peasants hereabouts. It is what sets in motion their whole life. The better sort of men are all making this effort, are all living for this purpose. It is the root of their industry, of their painstaking, frugal, saving lives. The opportunities there are under the Swiss system to acquire land give the land to those who deserve to have it. The system acts as a winnowing process. It sifts out the idle and profligate through the natural consequences of their idleness and profligacy; and rewards the thoughtful, the self-denying, and the hard-working through the natural consequences of their thoughtfulness, self-denial, and hard work. It is a self-acting case of social, moral, and intellectual selection.

It was very pleasing to contemplate how in the scene before me every little scrap of ground had been turned to the best account. If a few square yards could have been anywhere made or gained, the requisite labour had not been grudged. For this purpose everything had been done which ingenuity could have suggested, or hard work effected. We in very many places are allowing the sea to gain from us all it can. They gain from their lakes, and streams, and mountains all they can. Here every man’s heart is in the land; with us no man’s: not the landlord’s, who may never have seen it, except when he walked over it with his gun; not the tenant’s, who regards it with the feelings of a passing occupier; not the labourer’s, who thinks only of his wages, and regards the land merely as the scene of his daily toil. For the casual beholder, it has no suggestions but those of a food-factory. That it should be a food-factory is certainly the first and most necessary use of the land, and we should be glad to be assured that we were making the most of it in this respect. It would, however, be more interesting, and perhaps the better for us, if it had also some moral suggestions to make to us. Here you see that men are thinking of it when they are rising up, and when they are lying down, and while they are walking by the way, that it shapes their lives, that it makes them what they are. These facts and considerations are not a demonstration of the preferableness of peasant proprietorship, but they are, I think, a demonstration of one advantage, and that not an inconsiderable one, that is secured by making the land accessible to all, which it never can be while each generation is permitted so to settle and charge it as practically to take it out of the market of the generation that will follow.

Having got through my visits I went with Leuthold to see the valley of the Urbach. For this purpose we ascended the western mountain, and having reached what to us was the commencement, but in nature the end, of the valley, we had the upland village of Unterstock on the left. We advanced up the valley for about an hour with grand mountain scenery before us. Our object was not only to see the character of the valley, and of its mountain ranges, but also to look at its winter stabling for cows, that I might know how they are lodged and kept up here at that season. For this purpose we went into several. As the stalls are very low, and the cows closely packed, the temperature, whatever it may be outside, can never be very severe within. When the cows have been housed for the season, the men who have charge of them come up from below every evening to milk them. They sleep in the hayloft; and having again milked them in the morning, carry down the milk to the villages of Innertkirchen. Should the weather prove bad, these men remain in the high valley all day. To enable them to do this whenever requisite, fuel, potatoes, and cheese are stored in each byre. To the potatoes and cheese the cows add milk. As this is the arrangement adopted, it must, doubtless, be under existing circumstances the best, though one would have supposed that these daily journeys for and with the milk must require far more labour than would be necessary for bringing down the hay. What decides the question may be that labour is scarce and dear in summer, but abundant and cheap in winter. If, however, the existing mountain footpath could be made available for carts, the cows would then probably be made in the autumn to bring down themselves and their winter fodder.

I had had some reasons for looking forward to the little excursion upon which I am now about to enter, and so I dwell for a moment on these little incidents of my first afternoon, as one does on the first whiff of a cigar, or the first sip of a glass of wine. He wishes to taste to the full, and to assure himself of the good qualities of, what he had been for some time anticipating. It would be disappointing if he did not find, or imagine that he had found, the fruition equal to the anticipation.

August 1.—Off at 5 A.M. for Wasen by way of the Susten. The books make it 26¹⁄₂ miles. This I think somewhat beyond the true distance, though two English ladies assured me—they were the only English people I found at the hotel at Hof—that on riding across it yesterday they had found it more than fifty miles. It was a delightful walk, and offered many elements of interest. As to the culture and vegetation; they began with much variety. As we ascended, the walnut trees were the first to disappear from the prairies and the roadside; then the plums and apples. They were succeeded by the region of conifers with its gradations; first the spruce, then the larch, last of all the cembra. They in turn had to make way for the treeless upland pastures. In a Swiss valley the kind of trees around you, or the absence of trees, indicate the height to which you have ascended. They are a kind of natural hypsometer. The thinning out of the villages, and châlets, and prairies keeps pace with the thinning out of the species of trees. The Gadmenbach was never far from the path. You often cross, or see on the opposite side of the valley some blustering torrent, or some mere thread of water, hastening to join it. Cliffs of naked rock appeared at all elevations: sometimes protruded in the valley bottom below you; sometimes higher up on its sides; at all events generally on the summits in sight. At times we had glimpses of distant snowfields. The soil, which the industry of many generations has accumulated and preserved on the surface, is good on this, the Gadmen side of the Pass, and so the predominant colour around us was green of varying tints, generally the lively green of the prairies; at this time at its liveliest, for the hay had lately been carried, and the second growth was again springing up, without bents and seed stalks. There was enough in all this pleasantly to feed the eye and the mind. With these objects before you, you cannot but be kindly disposed towards every peasant you meet, for you see how hard he must be toiling, as his fathers must have done before him, to extort the means of living from the scene which is giving you so much pleasure.

At the distance of an hour or two from Hof, a stream—I was told that its name is Schwazbach—comes tumbling down its rocky course from the mountain on your left, and, rushing under a bridge you cross, hurries on to join the Gadmenbach a little below the bridge. It is composed, in American phrase, of two forks, which unite themselves into a single stream half-a-dozen yards above the bridge. At the point of the rocky interposed peninsula grows a willow of many branches, and no main trunk. The branches form angles with the stream of all dimensions, some being erect, while some were on that day only just clear of the water. My attention was first attracted by the little tree itself, which had managed to establish itself in so conspicuous a situation, and one so likely to have been undermined from either side. You have done well, I thought, to hold on there so long. As I looked at it I found that its branches were peopled with a horde of some hundreds of large black caterpillars. Each was two or three inches long. If my boyish entomological recollections are not at fault, we have not in England a willow-feeding species of this kind. As I observed the colony, thinking that the perpetual din and spray had done them no harm, I noticed that all that were there were on the upper half of the tree. On the lower half the younger leaves of every branch had been eaten off, some completely, some partially, the oldest only being untouched, just as was the case with the leaves of the branches of the upper part of the tree; what, then, had become of those who had eaten them? Down to a certain level every twig had its residents; below that level not one. It was evident that the lower twigs, too, had lately been tenanted; but where were their late tenants? They had not emigrated to the branches immediately above the deserted ones, for those had no more occupants than the topmost branches. Nor would any enemy have cleared off in this regular manner those on the lower branches, and neglected those on the upper ones. There could, therefore, be but one explanation. There had lately been two or three days of continuous heavy rain. This must have swollen our impetuous stream to an additional height of three or four feet. Up to this height, then, the lower branches had been submerged, and all that dwelt upon them swept away; just as might have been the case with the exposed portion of some village of poor peasants, on which an avalanche had fallen. Whether those who had lived in this exposed quarter of the village had been better or worse Christians than others would have had no effect in turning aside, or in bringing down the avalanche, any more than analogous considerations had to do, as we are told, either with the fall, or with the effects of the fall, of the tower of Siloam. With our caterpillars, at all events, no theory of misdoings, or shortcomings, is available. What, then, we call chance, or accident, but which may be nothing of the kind—prevails among caterpillars as well as among Christians. The avalanche falls, and crushes half a village of Christians; the stream rises, and drowns half a colony of sociable caterpillars. There is, however, this difference between the conditions of the two; the caterpillar not having the power of anticipating and guarding against many of the contingencies of its lot, will not, probably, die of natural decay. Sooner or later, in the present, or in the succeeding, stage of its existence, it will fall a prey to some stronger insect, or to some bird or beast—these went to feed the fish, or aquatic insects; but the Christian has that faculty which made him a Christian, and which enables him to foresee and provide against most of the accidents and chances to which he is exposed; and so he has, or should, have, a fair chance of dying of natural decay. The mischief is that he has not been taught to exercise this faculty as much as he might, and ought; and that, therefore, he is still liable to be carried off more frequently than need be by polluted water, polluted air, overwork of body, or of mind, overfeeding, and many other such, not accidents, but preventible causes, among which must be reckoned his having placed his dwelling on a site exposed to avalanches, or floods, or malarious exhalations. Perhaps the time will come when not to do all that we have been permitted to do in the way of providing against the action of such causes will be regarded as irreligious, as a tempting of Providence, as a sinful neglect of the laws of God.

And so I walked on and on, and up and up, pleasantly contemplating the objects of the scene around, pleasantly spinning and weaving thought, and, when tired of that, pleasantly talking to Leuthold. I had already taken a liking to him. He was a clean-built, well-featured man, with a gentle voice, and gentle thoughts. His wife had for some time been in feeble health, and this seemed to be making him still more gentle and thoughtful. I now recall one of his sayings; ‘If a man has health and strength for his work, and is satisfied with his family, he has the best riches.’ His trade was that of furniture-making, by which he supported himself and his family during the winter. Not much can be earned in this way at Innertkirchen; and, therefore, and, too, because like his neighbours he was investing in land all he could save, he had to live hard. His fare during the long winter was potatoes, milk, and coffee, with meat only on Sundays. Of land, however, he had enough for two cows. I was amused at his having brought with him his ice-axe, for this would lead some of those we met to credit me with the intention of essaying difficult ascents, though I was not contemplating anything of the kind. It, however, indicated that he was himself ready for such undertakings. He confided to me his intention of purchasing on his return home some English volume, and of endeavouring by its aid to acquire a knowledge of the language. The following question which, after a pause of some moments, he put to me this morning will show that he had already made a beginning in this study; ‘How many clocks will you dine to-day?’

At last we reached the little inn of Stein, at the foot of the great Stein glacier. We were here 6,122 feet above the sea, and about 1,300 below the Pass. For some time all that was bright, and soft, and humanly pleasing in the scene had been dying out. On our left we had lost the lofty ridge of the Gadmen Fluh, now screened by the Wendenhorn, behind which, and so out of sight to us, it was rising into the Titlis, its culminating point. On our right were grand ravine-torn, and perpendicular-faced precipices. At the little inn we found ourselves close upon the glacier. As this mighty mass has been advancing for the last thirty years, you will think that in the arrangements of inexorable Nature the days of the little inn are numbered; and so as you sit outside, in the warm sunshine, a rock for your table and seat, and the green turf for your footstool, with your bread and cheese and wine before you, and with the herd of kine, some quietly grazing around you, and some lying down, and meditatively chewing the cud, you will feel as if the vast icefield beside and above you were some cold-blooded, remorseless, living monster, that is leisurely and irresistibly advancing in his own fashion to spread himself over, and obliterate all around you. The turf, however, and the little inn will not be unavenged, for the sun, whose warmth you are now feeling so delightful at this altitude, or a diminution of pressure from the snowfields above, will some day oblige the monster to recoil again to his own proper domain of eternal cold and barrenness.

Having finished your bread and cheese, and chopine of wine, and well sunned yourself, your muscles will have recovered their tone, and you will begin to make the last ascent along the side of the northern mountain. The mighty monster is here a little beneath you, on your right, as it were sleeping with one of his feet resting against the mountain you are passing along, the other being to the west of the rocky eminence before you. His vast body and shoulders are spread out for many an acre between this eminence and the heights of the Sustenhörner and Thierberg, on which reposes his snowy, shaggy head. His hugeness, form, and position, make him worthy of far more notice than he has as yet received. The reason why so few go to see him is, I believe, that the books overstate the walk that is required for going. Of this, if taken from the west, an hour may be struck off at its commencement by starting from Hof instead of from Meiringen, which reduces it to ten hours of not hard work even for a first walk, as I found it this day. Or, if this be considered too much, it may be divided into two easy stages, by sleeping at Stein; and who would not be glad to sleep more than 6,000 feet above his usual level, and at the foot of so grand a glacier?

Having reached the summit of the Pass, an entirely different scene presents itself to your view. The aspects and colouring, and whole character of the Meienthal are almost the reverse of those of the Gadmenthal. It is but thinly clad with turf, which, too, is of sombre tints. There is none of the lively green you have left behind you. The forest is a long time in reappearing, and nowhere throughout do the pines grow vigorously. Here on this side man has to struggle more hardly to maintain himself. The villages are fewer and further between. Wherever you turn bleakness and barrenness are the predominant suggestions. This gives you new effects, and by simplifying the mountain masses, makes them appear grander.

After three hours, or more, you see straight before you a somewhat steep, half pine-clad ridge. You advance towards it, and at somewhat over ten hours from Hof, including your halt at Stein, you find yourself at Wasen in the valley of Uri, on the road to the St. Gothard, and that the mountain which had lately been before you, and which is a fine termination to your walk, is the western range of the Valley of Uri.

August 2.—Walked to Andermatt for breakfast. The building of the new hotels I noticed last year at Göschenen, the northern entrance of the St. Gothard tunnel, was going on as briskly as then. Of course, before the railway is completed, there will be a post-road across the Susten, and so that route will have become a feeder to these hotels; and this new road will itself be fed by another from the Valais over the Grimsel, and through the Haslithal; and so there will be a considerable stream of people who, from that direction, will take the rail at Göschenen. There will also be many who will for this purpose come to the same point from the Grisons by way of Andermatt. Possibly, therefore, they may not be building too many hotels. At all events the tide of travellers in Switzerland is still rising, and probably will continue to rise, for we cannot at present imagine any reason for its subsiding, or point to any instances in which hotel building appears to have been overdone.

At Andermatt a telegram from his wife was awaiting my good guide, to tell him that if he wished ever again to see her alive, he must immediately return home. As he showed it to me tears rose to his eyes. Within five minutes of our arrival at Andermatt he was on his way back to Hof. Poor fellow! In his solitary walk home he would have reason and opportunity enough for recalling what he had yesterday said to me of the place domestic happiness occupied, in his estimation, among the constituents of the true riches. Though he had been with me only two days, I had already come to regard him very favourably, and would have trusted him farther than I could have seen him.