A change of cap was the only dressing necessary for the volunteer, and we faced the fog and rain, which elicited from him such a disgraceful amount of swearing, that it was on all accounts well when the rain ceased for a few minutes, the mists rolled off, and the clouds lifted sufficiently to betray the surface of the Lake of Geneva, luxuriating in the clear warmth of an early summer’s day, and making us shiver by the painful contrast which our own altitude presented.  The deep blue of the lake brought to mind the story of the shepherd of Gessenay (Saanen), of whom it is told that when he was passing the hills with some friends for a first visit to Vevey, and came in sight of the lake, which he had never seen before, he turned and hurried home incontinent, declaring that he would not enter a country where the good God had made the blue sky to fall and fill the valleys.

In this bright interval we came upon a magnificent fox, and the peasant’s impulse was, ‘Oh, for a good gun!’ an exclamation which would have sounded horrible to English ears, if I had not been previously broken in to it by an invitation from a Scotch gamekeeper to a fox-hunt, when he promised an excellent gun, and a stance which the foxes were sure to pass.

The rain now came on again, and the guide thought he had had plenty of it, and must return for the afternoon milking; and just then, as good luck would have it, we stumbled upon an immense clump of nettles which had been one of our landmarks two days before, so that he was no longer necessary, and we said affectionate adieux.

The glaciere was in a state of ruin.  Only the right-hand column, not speaking heraldically, was standing, the others lying in blocks frozen hard together on the ground.  The column which still stood was much shrunken, and seemed too small for its fissure, the sides of which it scarcely touched.  The wind blew down the entrance slope so determinedly, that a candle found it difficult to live at the bottom of the first cave; and a portion of the current blew into the glaciere, and in its sweep exactly struck the fallen columns, the edges of which were already rounded by thaw.  Much of this must be attributed to the recent opening of the second shaft (p. 5), which admits a thorough draught through the first cave, and so exposes the glaciere to currents of warmer air; and I should expect to find that in future the ice will disappear from that part of the cave every summer, [7] whereas in 1861 we found it thick and dry (excepting a few small basins containing water) and evidently permanent, in the middle of a very hot August.  The low part of the cave was so completely protected from the current, that the candle burned there quite steadily for an hour and a half:  still, like the others, the column at that end of the glaciere was broken down, and it therefore became necessary to attribute its fall to some other agency than the current of external air.  There had been a very large amount