on the continent. My father was a merchant, and had friends in the
different European cities, and there was little danger that I should
lack for attention; and with a supply of letters, and one in
particular to a friend of my father's, a pastor among the mountains
of Switzerland, I started. I pass over the leave-taking; finding
myself alone on the sea; the nights of calm when leaning over the
ship's side, looking down into the dark depths, murmuring snatches of
home songs, bringing up vividly before me faces of those I loved; and
as the ocean swells came rocking under us, down we went into the
valleys and up over the hills of water. I felt as safe, rocked in the
great cradle of the deep, as when at home. His eye was upon me; His
arm encircled me.

"But pleasant as the voyage and full of memories, I see that you are
impatient to pass over to the mountains of Switzerland. Words are weak
to describe the magnificence of the Juras: looking upon the rolling
heights shrouded with pine-trees, and down thousands of feet at the
very roadside, upon cottage roofs and emerald valleys, where the deer
herds were feeding quietly. All this I had seen, and then we came to a
little town called Bex; and here, from too much expenditure of
enthusiasm perhaps, I was confined for weeks with a raging fever.

"One day, when the fever left me weak and feeble as a child, who
should enter but the good pastor Ortler. He had heard of my illness,
and leaving home, he had travelled over the hills to nurse me in my
weakness; and when I grew strong enough to bear it, he treated me to
short drives along Lake Leman, whence we could see the meadows that
skirt Geneva, the rough, shaggy mountains of Savoy, and far behind
them, so far that we could not distinguish between cap and cloud, Mont
Blanc and the needles of Chamouni.