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already making the East glow like a sapphire; and the birds are singing their sweet early hymn of praise; and the stars, that all night long spangled the firmament with fires, are dimly withdrawing into the blue ether; and between all this, and the fragrance of the aromatic eastern berry, if we too are not awake, and singing our morning hymn of gratitude and love, we shall make Nature herself ashamed of us.

Now

What pictures of beauty are the villages that lie nestled above us in the verdant nooks of the mountains! Ah yes, in the distance they are the very perfection of the romantic and picturesque, but the charm disappears when you ride through them as through a row of beggars on a dunghill. Both in the moral and material world, so far as man mingles his work with it, distance has always much to do with enchantment. up the broad valley, the secluded city of Aoste, nigh buried among mountains, opens upon us, the approach to it from the south as well as the north being most beautiful, through the rich foliage of magnificent chestnuts and walnuts. Romantic castles crown, here and there, the crags that rise from the bosom of the luxuriant vegetation.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE GRAND ST. BERNARD BY MOONLIGHT.-FLOOD OF
THE DRANCE.

Ir was about noon on Friday that I set out from Aoste on foot for the Grand St. Bernard, in order, by passing the mountain that night, to make a possible day's march to Chamouny before the Sabbath. Mine host gave me a miserable, drunken guide, a fat, bloated, hairy, savage looking wretch, whom, however, he recommended so highly, that between his word, and my anxiety to get on in season, I was persuaded to commit my knapsack to him, and we marched. But I almost had to drag the creature after me. He would drink nothing but wine, and quenched his thirst as often as he could get the opportunity; he was like a full hogshead attempting to walk. Then, at the

last village below the Hospice, he stopped and ordered supper, saying that they would give him nothing but soup and water on the mountain, and he chose to have something solid and palatable. The poor fellow might have got a very sufficient supper at the Hospice gratis, but he could not forego his wine. In order to hurry him, I took my knapsack on my own shoulders and hastened on, leaving him to follow, if he chose. It was night-fall, and we arrived at the Hospice about eight o'clock by the light of the rising moon.

The view of the lovely lake and the Hospice by moonlight, with the surrounding mountains, makes one of the wildest and most impressive scenes that can possibly be conceived of. There is a deep and awful stillness and solemnity, with the most gloomy grandeur.

"The moon, well nigh

To midnight hour belated, made the stars
Appear to wink and fade; and her broad disk
Seemed like a crag on fire, as up the vault
Her course she journeyed."-DANTE.

The day being Friday, as before, I could get no meat, though I had walked seven mortal hours and the air was keen; not even an egg, though I was actually hungry. No wonder my drunkard was determined to eat at St. Remy; the devout instinct of his stomach taught him that it was fast-day at the Hospice, which I had forgotten. But the coffee was delicious. Such a cup of Mocha, with the richest boiled milk, I never tasted. The material elements of life provided by the good monks are of the best kind, and doubtless it was my fault being hungry on Friday. It was a very heretical appetite, for which I could not get even the absolution of an egg.

Be

I persuaded a stout young herdsman at the Hospice to accompany me down the mountain, dismissed my drunkard, and after getting quite rested and enlivened by the hospitable coffee of the fast-keeping monks, we started about ten o'clock. fore leaving, I went once more over the magnificent collection in the Museum Egyptiacum at the Hospice, with the gallery of paintings. One of the paintings is a very remarkable piece, a blind fiddler by Espagnoletto.

The moonlight descent of the mountain, in so glorious a night, is an excursion of the greatest enjoyment, the air being cold and sparkling, inspiriting, and bracing the frame for exercise." With what majesty and glory did the moon rise in the heavens! With what a flood of light, falling on the ancient gray peaks, crags, and rugged mountain ridges, glittering on the glaciers, shining on the white foaming torrents, gilding the snowy outlines with ermines of pale fire, robing the fir-forests with a vail of melancholy, thoughtful, solemn beauty! In such an hour, in the stillness of midnight, the voices of the torrents, to the sky, the moon, and the mountains, go down into the soul. The wild gorges, the deep, torn ravines, the jagged precipices, the white glaciers, are invested by this moonlight of harvest, amidst their stern and awful desolation, with a charm that is indescribable. The little stone refuges by the path-side for storm-beaten travellers, and burial vaults for dead ones, slept quietly under the moon, with their iron grated windows, singular objects, of which no man could guess the purpose.

The lonely area of the Cantine, or house of refuge, so desolate when I passed up, was now clad in grandeur and beauty. The snowy peaks, rising above the more sombre and gray ridges, might have been deemed the alabaster spires and domes, or the encircling walls of some celestial city. The utter loneliness of the city was singularly shaded and humanized by a light visible so far up the mountains, that it seemed as if it burned from the bottom of the glacier. My guide said it was possibly a light in the cabin of some bold, industrious Chamois hunter. How that single light, in the recesses below the glacier, vails and softens the wild mountain with an imaginative, almost domestic interest!

"Even as a dragon's eye, that feels the stress
Of a bedimming sleep, or as a lamp,
Sullenly glaring through sepulchral damp,
So burns yon taper mid its black recess
Of Mountains, silent, dreary, motionless :
The lake below reflects it not; the sky
Muffled in clouds affords no company
To mitigate and cheer its loneliness.
Yet round the body of that joyless thing,

Which sends so far its melancholy light,
Perhaps are seated in domestic ring
A gay society with faces bright,

Conversing, reading, laughing; or they sing,
While hearts and voices in the song unite."

Our descent from the mountain was so rapid, that we arrived at Liddes between twelve and one o'clock, but the surly inhabitants would not admit us into either of the inns. Not a soul was stirring in the village. After many ineffectual attempts, we roused some signs of life in the main hôtel, a window was cautiously raised, a nightcap appeared, and a female voice informed us that every room in the house had been taken in possession by a party of Englishmen for the mountains, and they would not let us in. We enquired if they would make us sleep in the street, but they shut the window, and Pariey the porter was not to be tempted. In the other inn we succeeded in getting the door open, but were warned off the premises by angry sleepers in their beds. Here was a predicament. There was not a shed nor a bundle of straw where we could lie down, but we could walk all night more safely than we could have slept by the way-side; and so I determined to go on.

The next village of Orsieres was about three hours' distance, We could get there with all ease between three and four o'clock in the morning, and the night was so glorious that it might have tempted a traveller to the walk, even had there been no compulsion. For us there was no alternative. My guide had engaged to come only as far as Liddes, but I persuaded him by a new bargain, and again we started off. So, after a walk of thirty-nine miles, performed between twelve at noon and four the next morning, we came to a conclusive halt at Orsieres, where I succeeded in getting a bed in a very comfortable hôtel, and slept soundly, as a labouring man has a perfect right to do.

About nine o'clock the same morning, I was on my way again with a new guide, for who could think of walking all the way to Chamouny under a heavy knapsack, after forty miles pedestrian travel of the preceding sixteen hours? The weather continued delightful, and strange to say, I felt very little fatigue. The air bore me up in its elastic embrace, and made

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me cheerful. It was like the effect of earnest spiritual effort in the heavenly pilgrimage; the soul grows strong and elastic by journeying upwards. The fatigue of one day fits it the better for the labours of the next. My soul followeth hard after Thee; thy right hand upholdeth me:—when there is this hard labour of the soul after God (and David's language is very emphatic), there is also the right hand of God upholding it; it is upborne on indefatigable wings, every effort bringing new strength and lightness. Very blessed is such mountain air and exercise.

I was

I am right glad to find that the wonders of Alpine scenery lose none of their effect by familiarity; nay, they grow upon the mind, as it learns to appreciate and compare them. more impressed with the features of the landscape before me than I had been in coming up the valley in August. The road between St. Branchier and Beauvernois presents a scene of savage desolation and picturesque wildness not often rivalled, even in Switzerland.

The furious torrent Drance thunders down the gorge between rugged and inaccesible mountains, where there is no vegetation but such as has fallen from its hold, as it were, in despair, and struggles in confusion. Rocks are piled up as if a whole mountain had fallen with its own weight; a gallery overhanging the torrent is passed through, and to add some picturesqueness in a view of almost unrelenting desolation, you have a rude little wooden bridge carelessly thrown across the cataract for the inhabitants. A friar was leisurely fishing for trout along the eddying borders of the water.

This valley was the scene of that awful sweep of destruction caused by the gathering and bursting of a great lake among the glaciers, where the Drance was dammed up in the mountains. The chaos of rocks I had passed through were memorials of its progress. One of the boulders rolled down by the cataract is said to contain 1400 square feet. This inundation happened in 1818. From a similar cause, the falling of great glaciers from the mountains across the bed of the Drance, and so damming it up, there was a much more terrible destruction in the year 1595, by which more than one hundred and forty