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very penitent, I must tell everything-yes, to revenge myself by becoming an illustrious artist with all the world at my feet. Then you should see whom you had jilted, because, forsooth, he was poor and obscure !'

'Well, I hope you will still show us what you are, Frank,' said Kate, laughing, and not to permit recent events to smother up all these glories from the world."

'I do not know about that,' replied Frank; 'I rather think I shall now resume my high moral tone about fame-tell you in old saws and proverbs that it is a vapour, a shadow, an illusion-and exercise a proper philosopher's contempt for it, more especially as I find the pyramid higher and the sides steeper than I thought. However, I dare say I was silly enough. To resume.

'I had now Carlo's gracious permission to write to you, but your letter made me careless about the main object I had proposed to myself, namely, that I might assure

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you of my safety. In my shame and anger I was now as anxious to be thought dead both by you and all the world, until at least I should have become famous under another name, as I was just before to be thought alive. I resolved therefore to let the current account of my death pass for true, and only wrote to a London friend, on whose discretion I could rely, to draw my money from a certain bank there and send it to me under an assumed name that I might procure my freedom. This was about a month after I fell into their hands, and more than another month elapsed before I received any answer. As they would not allow me to go outside, I spent the interval partly in sketching Francesca and the brigands by the firelight, partly in brooding over my imaginary wrongs, and partly in listening to the strange tales these fellows narrated as they sat smoking their pipes at night; but I soon began to have another cause for deep anxiety.'

Doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world.

K Hen. IV.

THE BATHS OF SANTA CATARINA. OT long ago I was standing on the balcony of a well-known inn near the baths of St. Moritz. A little procession of ladies and gentlemen issued from the hotel and descended the slopes towards the banks of the lake. I immediately became aware--I know not whether from positive information or from some instinctive sense of reverence -that for the first time in my life I was standing in presence of a genuine king. An emperor I have seen before, and I have more than once taken off my hat to the queen of these islands. But a king is now a rarity, and I was proportionately delighted with the opportunity of discharging in my own person the functions of a Court Circular. His majesty, I might say on my own authority, accompanied by his royal consort, and attended by the lords and ladies in waiting, took the recreation of a walk on the banks of the Lake of St. Moritz. Yet a certain drop of bitterness mingled in my cup, and it was intensified by an incident which took place that evening. I was confronted at supper by a person belonging to a class unfortunately not so rare as that of royal personages. The genuine British cockney in all his terrors was before me. The windows of the dining-room opened upon all the soft beauty of a quiet Alpine valley in a summer evening. Far above us the snow-clad range of the Palu and Bernina still glowed with the last rays of the setting sun. But the cockney was not softened by its influence, and he talked in full perfection the language of his native He elaborately discussed the badness of the liquors provided for he tasted some of the bottle which I had ordered, and was peacefully consuming, and condescended to inform me that it was 'devilish bad.' He went into the merits of

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all the inns which had had the benefit of his patronage, discriminated with great clearness between the qualities of the Cognac which they provided; and showed his superiority as a Briton by condemning them all with various degrees of severity, with the exception of one whose landlord had been waiter at a great London hotel, and had thereby attained a comparative degree of civilisation. He thought it proper to add a few remarks upon the scenery of the country, extracted with more or less fidelity from Murray or Baedeker; and I know not whether his æsthetical or his practical remarks were the most significant of delicate sensibility. Anyhow, two hours of his conversation were enough for my nerves, and I retired to meditate on things in general, and the beauty of the evening. One conclusion became abundantly clear to me. Kings and cockneys, I thought, may be excellent people in their way. I love cockneys because they are my neighbours, and the love of our neighbour is a Christian duty. I revere kings because I was taught to do so at school, to say nothing of the sermons and church services in which the same duty was impressed. But they have in common the property of being very objectionable neighbours at an hotel. They raise prices and destroy solitude, and make an Alpine valley pretty nearly as noisy and irritating to the nerves as St. James's. Was it worth while to travel some hundred miles to find one's self still in the very thick of civilisation? Kings, I know, have to travel (sometimes against their will), and so must cockneys, if it is right, which I admit to be an open question, that either class should continue to exist; and certainly so long as they exist, I have no right to demand their expulsion from

the Engadine. Indeed, on second thoughts, it is perhaps as well that they should go there. The gregarious instinct has doubtless been implanted in the breast of the common-place traveller for a wise purpose. It is true that it leads migratory herds to spoil and trample under foot some of the loveliest of Alpine regions such as Chamouni or Interlaken. But, on the other hand, it draws them all together into a limited number of districts, and leaves vast regions untrodden and unspoilt on either side of the beaten tracks. St. Moritz acts like one of those flytraps to be seen in old-fashioned inns, which do not indeed diminish the swarms of intrusive insects, but profess at least to confine them to one spot. And if any district were to be selected into which the cockneyism of the surrounding Alps might be drained as into a reservoir, certainly no bet ter selection could be made than St. Moritz. The upper valley of the Inn is one of the very few Alpine districts which may almost be called ugly. The high bleak level tract, with monotonous ranges of pine forests at a uniform slope, has as little of the picturesque as can well be contrived in the mountains. Even in the great peaks, there is a singular want of those daring and graceful forms, those spires, and domes, and pinnacles, which give variety and beauty to the other great mountain masses. I should rejoice if it could be made into Norfolk Island of the Alps, and all kings, cockneys, persons travelling with couriers, Americans doing Europe against time, Cook's tourists and their like, commercial travellers, and especially that variety of English clergyman which travels in dazzling white ties and forces church services upon you by violence in remote country inns, could be confined within it to amuse or annoy each other. Meanwhile,

though this policy has not been carried out, it is gratifying that a spontaneous process of natural selection has done something of the kind. Like flies to like; the cockney element accumulates like the precious metal in the lodes of rich mines; and some magnificent nug. gets may be found in and about St. Moritz; but luckily at no great distance may be found regions as bare of cockneys as a certain Wheal something or other of my (too close) acquaintance appears to be of copper. A day's journey, I knew, would take us into regions still in all the freshness of their primitive innocence; regions where the Times is never seen, where English is heard as rarely as Sanskrit, and where (I mention a fact) the native herdsman who offers milk to the weary traveller refuses to take coin in exchange for it. As I thought of these things I rejoiced that we could leave St. Moritz behind us, and fly to a certain haven of refuge. I almost hesitate to reveal the name of the hiding-place to which we retreated. Shall I not in some degree be accessory to the intrusion of some detachment from that army of British travellers which is forcing its relentless way into every hole and corner of the coun try? Will not some future wan derer take up his parable against me and denounce this paper as amongst the first trifling hints which raised the sluices and let the outside world into this little paradise? My reluctance, however, is over. powered by certain weighty reasons. As, first, I cannot hope that my voice will attract the notice of any great number of persons; secondly, my readers, though few, will of course be amongst the select, whose presence will be a blessing rather than a curse to the inhabitants: thirdly, the inhabitants would, I am sure, be grateful for an adver tisement, and I should be glad to do them a trifling service, even

though, in my judgment, of doubtful value; fourthly, if any appreciable number of Britons should take the hint, they will at least bring with them one benefit, which cannot be reckoned as inconsiderable, namely, a freer use of the tub and scrubbing-brush; and considering that the insinuation conveyed in the last sentence would in itself be sufficient to hold many persons at a distance, I will take courage and avow that the place of which I have been speaking is Santa Catarina, near Bormico. Thither in two days' easy travelling from St. Moritz, we conveyed ourselves and our baggage, and to it I propose to devote a few pages of rather desultory remark. I cannot do all that would be required from the compiler of a handbook; I know little of the waters consumed by the guests, except that they have a nasty taste at their first outbreak, but are good to drink with indifferent wine; nor am I great at orographical or geological or botanical disquisitions; but are not these things written in the admirable guide-book of Mr. Ball? and, finally, if one person should be induced by the perusal-but the formula is something musty.

I must beg my readers to imagine an Alpine meadow, a mile or two in diameter, level as a cricket field, covered with the velvet turf of a mountain pasturage, and looking exquisitely soft and tender to eyes wearied with the long dusty valley which stretches from the Lake of Como to the foot of the Stelvio. Let him place a few châlets, upon whose timbers age has conferred a rich brown hue, at picturesque intervals, and then enclose the whole with mighty mountain walls to keep the profane vulgar at a distance. On two sides purple forests of pine rise steeply from the meadow floor and meet a little way below the inn to form the steep gorge through which the glacier torrent foams downwards

to join the Adda at Bormio. In front the glen is closed by a steeper mountain, whose lower slopes are too rough and broken to admit of continuous forest. Above them rise bare and precipitous rocks, and from the platform thus formed there soars into the air one of the most graceful of snow-peaks, called the Tresero. It resembles strongly the still nobler pyramid of the Weisshorn, as seen from the Riffel at Zermatt. It is certainly not comparable in majesty with that most majestic of mountains; as indeed it falls short of it in height by some three or four thousand feet. One advantage it may perhaps claim even above so redoubtable a rival: the Weisshorn only reveals its full beauties to those who have climbed to a considerable height above the ordinary limits of habitation, whereas the Tresero condescends to exhibit itself even to the least adventurous of tourists. It is, indeed, like all other great mountains, more lovely when contemplated from something like a level with itself. Lofty Alps, like lofty characters, require for their due appreciation some elevation in the spectator. One of the most perfect moments in which I have ever

caught a share of the true mountain spirit was when looking at the Tresero from a high shelf on the opposite range. The immediate foreground was formed by a little tarn, covered in great part with the white tufts of the cotton-grass, dancing as merrily in the evening breeze as Wordsworth's notorious daffodils. Two massive ribs of rock descending on each side, like Catchedicam and the huge nameless peak' embracing the Red Tarn on Helvellyn, formed a kind of framework to the picture. In front, the whole intervening space was filled by the towering cone of the Tresero, with torn glaciers streaming from its sides, and glowing with the indescribable colours of sunset on eter

nal snow. The perfect calmness of an Alpine evening, with not a sound but the tinkling of cattle-bells below, gave a certain harmony to the picture, and breathed the very essence of repose. The domestic quiet of English fields in an autumn evening is impressive and soothing; but there is something far more impressive to my mind in the repose of one of these great Alps, which shows in every rock and contorted glacier that clings to its sides the severity of its habitual struggle with the elements. It is the repose of a soldier resting in the midst of a battle,-not that of a stolid farmer smoking his evening pipe after a supper of fat bacon. Seen, however, from any point of view, and under any circumstances, whether under a clear sky or when a thunderstorm is gathering under the lee of its grand cliffs, the Tresero is a lovely object. At Santa Catarina it naturally forms the centre of every view, or serves as a charming background to the more diminutive, but hardly less exquisite pictures which a traveller may discover in every nook and corner of the Alps.

To complete the portrait of Santa Catarina, I must add one, and, it must be admitted, a very important, element in the view. We are constantly assured in an advertisement which has lately been appearing that the finest scenery in the world is improved by a good hotel in the foreground. There is some truth in the aphorism; and I shall certainly not seek to dispute its application in the present case. I must therefore ask the reader to place on the edge of the flat meadow a long low building of rough stone, resembling a barrack more than an hotel. Outside there is nothing very attractive; and within there are certain difficulties to be overcome by a fastidious taste. The establishment has a certain dishevelled and perplexed aspect, not exactly in harmony with English notions of order.

There is an unorganised crowd of persons, male and female, who appear more or less to discharge the duty of waiters and chambermaids. One is occasionally tripped up by a stumbling-block on the stairs composed of an overwearied woman, who has fallen asleep whilst accidentally blacking a miscellaneous boot. The scrubbing of floors seems to be trusted to the occasional zeal of volunteers, and the zeal requires some prompting from surreptitious bribes. A garment entrusted to the washerwoman has to be recovered a week afterwards by a journey of discovery through certain mysterious subterraneous passages. If you want a dish the best plan is to go into the kitchen, where amongst a crowd of smokers and idlers you may be able to enter into conversation with the cook. The landlord as a general rule is round the corner with a cigar in his mouth talking to a friend. Were it not that the head waiter is a man of genius, the whole management of the business would be in danger of collapse. Moreover, to hint at a delicate point, you may probably be seated at dinner opposite to a lady or gentleman of primitive costume, whose ideas on the respective uses of knives, fingers, and forks are totally opposed to all the usages current in the polite society of London. Neither, I am bound to confess, is Santa Catarina a complete exception to a highly general rule that the visitors to baths are not amongst the most congenial of companions. Yet the remark reminds me of one great compensation. Neither guests nor inhabitants are English. If they were they would nearly be intole rable. Nor does this remark, when rightly understood, imply any want of proper patriotism. An Englishman is, of course, the first of created beings; and he owes this pre-eminence in great degree to his remarkable powers of self-assertion. As an Italian visitor informed me, the

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