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To-day, riding broilingly through hay-fields to-morrow, stuck in snow drifts! Dear Henry: You cannot think how beautiful are these Alpine valleys. Our course, all the first morning after we left Chamouni, lay beside a broad, hearty, joyous mountain torrent, called, perhaps from the darkness of its waters, Eau Noire. Charming meadows skirted its banks.
And if ever a superstitious feeling comes over me among the pine glades, it is never tainted with the old German forest fear, but it is only a more solemn tone of the fairy enchantment that haunts our English meadows; so that I have always called the prettiest pine-glade in Chamouni, "Fairies' Hollow." An almost isolated rock promontory, many coloured, rises at the end of it.
After visiting Rome, Milan, and Vienna, for which last city he wrote "Linda di Chamouni," our composer returned to Paris, and in 1843 wrote "Don Pasquale" for the Theatre Italien, and "Don Sebastian" for the Académie.
From Servoz three leagues remain to Chamouni Mont Blanc was before us the Alps, with their innumerable glaciers on high all around, closing in the complicated windings of the single vale forests inexpressibly beautiful, but majestic in their beauty intermingled beech and pine, and oak, overshadowed our road, or receded, while lawns of such verdure as I have never seen before occupied these openings, and gradually became darker in their recesses.
Up the valley, the view was cut off by bluff cliffs; whilst down it, the scene was most remarkable: enormous black, round-backed moraines, rose, tier above tier, from a flat lake-bed, apparently hemming in the river between the lofty precipices on the east flank of the valley. The slope from the top of Mont Blanc to the Chamouni valley is 2464 feet per mile, or 1 in 2.1.
The way she shovelled in the soup, an' stowed away the mutton chops, an' pitched into the pease and taters, to say nothing of cauliflower and cutlets, was a caution to the billions. It made my mouth water to look at her, an' my eyes too only that may have had somethin' to do with the keyhole, for them 'otels of Chamouni are oncommon draughty.
It is curious that when De Saussure visited Chamouni for the first time, his attention was arrested by the sight of women sowing what seemed to be grain of some kind in the snow; but, on enquiring, he found that it was only black earth, which the inhabitants spread on the snow in spring, in order to make it disappear sooner.
As soon as Lewis could turn his mind to anything, after his being brought back to the hotel, he asked earnestly after Nita Horetzki. "She has left," said Mrs Stoutley. "Left! D'you mean gone from Chamouni, mother?" exclaimed Lewis, with a start and a look of anxiety which he did not care to conceal. "Yes, they went yesterday.
In a day or two we shall go to Chamouni, and then Georgie and I will go back to Paris and London, and so home at the time appointed. Until then I remain as ever, Your loving father, C. E. STOWE. Mrs. Stowe accompanied her husband and daughter to England, where, after traveling and visiting for two weeks, she bade them good-by and returned to her daughters in Switzerland.
The ice sheet, grinding slowly over the hills and rocks, smoothed and polished and striated their surfaces in many places till they resembled the roches moutonnées similarly ground down in our own day by the moving ice rivers of Chamouni and Grindelwald.
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