“Lady Trevelyan is much better, and we hope all to get on to Neufchatel to-morrow.  The weather is quite fine again though not warm; and yesterday I took the children for a drive up the little valley which we used to drive through on leaving Dijon for Paris.  There are wooded hills on each side, and we got into a sweet valley, as full of nightingales as our garden is of thrushes, and with slopes of broken rocky ground above, covered with the lovely blue milk-wort, and purple columbines, and geranium, and wild strawberry-flowers.  The children were intensely delighted, and I took great care that Constance should not run about so as to heat herself, and we got up a considerable bit of hill quite nicely, and with greatly increased appetite for tea, and general mischief.  They have such appetites that I generally call them ’my two little pigs.’  There is a delightful French waiting-maid at dinner here—­who says they are both ‘charmantes,’ but highly approves of my title for them nevertheless.”

     “NEUFCHATEL, 10th May, 1866.

“Lady Trevelyan is still too weak to move.  We had (the children and I) a delightful day yesterday at the Pierre a Bot, gathering vetches and lilies of the valley in the woods, and picnic afterwards on the lovely mossy grass, in view of all the Alps—­Jungfrau, Eiger, Blumlis Alp, Altels, and the rest, with intermediate lake and farmsteads and apple-blossom—­very heavenly.”

Here, within a few days, Lady Trevelyan died.  Throughout her illness she had been following the progress of the new notes on wild-flowers (afterwards to be “Proserpina”) with keen interest, and Sir Walter lent the help of botanical science to Ruskin’s more poetical and artistic observations.  For the sake of this work, and for the “children,” and with a wise purpose of bearing up under the heavy blow that had fallen, the two friends continued their journey for a while among the mountains.

From Thun they went to Interlachen and the Giessbach.  Ruskin occupied himself closely in tracing Studer’s sections across the great lake-furrow of central Switzerland—­“something craggy for his mind to break upon,” as Byron said when he was in trouble.  At the Giessbach there was not only geology and divine scenery, enjoyable in lovely weather, but an interesting figure in the foreground, the widowed daughter of the hotel landlord, beautiful and consumptive, but brave as a Swiss girl should be.  They all seem to have fallen in love with her, so to speak the young English girls as much as the impressionable art-critic:  and the new human interest in her Alpine tragedy relieved, as such interests do, the painfulness of the circumstances through which they had been passing.  Her sister Marie was like an Allegra to this Penserosa; bright and brilliant in native genius.  She played piano-duets with the young ladies; taught Alpine botany to the savants; guided them to the secret dells and unknown points of view; and with a sympathy unexpected in a stranger, beguiled them out of their grief, and won their admiration and gratitude.  Marie of the Giessbach was often referred to in letters of the time, and for many years after, with warmly affectionate remembrances.