A few bits from his letters to his mother, which I have been permitted to copy, will indicate the impressions of this summer’s tour.

     “HOTEL DU GIESBACH, 6th June, 1866,

     “MY DEAREST MOTHER,

“Can you at all fancy walking out in the morning in a garden full of lilacs just in rich bloom, and pink hawthorn in masses; and along a little terrace with lovely pinks coming into cluster of colour all over the low wall beside it; and a sloping bank of green sward from it—­and below that, the Giesbach!  Fancy having a real Alpine waterfall in one’s garden,—­seven hundred feet high.  You see, we are just in time for the spring, here, and the strawberries are ripening on the rocks.  Joan and Constance have been just scrambling about and gathering them for me.  Then there’s the blue-green lake below, and Interlaken and the lake of Thun in the distance.  I think I never saw anything so beautiful.  Joan will write to you about the people, whom she has made great friends with, already.”

     “7th June, 1866.

“I cannot tell you how much I am struck with the beauty of this fall:  it is different from everything I have ever seen in torrents.  There are so many places where one gets near it without being wet, for one thing; for the falls are, mostly, not vertical so as to fly into mere spray, but over broken rock, which crushes the water into a kind of sugar-candy-like foam, white as snow, yet glittering; and composed, not of bubbles, but of broken-up water.  Then I had forgotten that it plunged straight into the lake; I got down to the lake shore on the other side of it yesterday, and to see it plunge clear into the blue water, with the lovely mossy rocks for its flank, and for the lake edge, was an unbelievable kind of thing; it is all as one would fancy cascades in fairyland.  I do not often endure with patience any cockneyisms or showings off at these lovely places.  But they do one thing here so interesting that I can forgive it.  One of the chief cascades (about midway up the hill) falls over a projecting rock, so that one can walk under the torrent as it comes over.  It leaps so clear that one is hardly splashed, except at one place.  Well, when it gets dark, they burn, for five minutes, one of the strongest steady fireworks of a crimson colour, behind the fall.  The red light shines right through, turning the whole waterfall into a torrent of fire.”

     “11th June, 1866.

“We leave, according to our programme, for Interlachen to-day,—­with great regret, for the peace and sweetness of this place are wonderful and the people are good; and though there is much drinking and quarrelling among the younger men, there appears to be neither distressful poverty, nor deliberate crime:  so that there is more of the sense I need, and long for, of fellowship with human creatures, than in any place I have been at for years.  I believe they don’t