hours of battling with impermeable drifts. The wine is often frozen into one solid mass of rosy ice before it reaches Pontresina. This does not hurt the young vintage; but it is highly injurious to wine of some years' standing. The perils of the journey are aggravated by the savage temper of the drivers. Jealousies between the natives of rival districts spring up; and there are men alive who have fought the whole way down from Fluela Hospice to Davos Platz with knives and stones, hammers and hatchets, wooden staves and splintered cart-wheels, staining the snow with blood, and bringing broken pates, bruised limbs, and senseless comrades home to their women to be tended.

Bacchus Alpinus shepherded his train away from us to northward, and we passed forth into noonday from the gallery. It then seemed clear that both conductor and postilion were sufficiently merry. The plunge they took us down those frozen parapets, with shriek and jauchzen and cracked whips, was more than ever dangerous. Yet we reached La Rosa safely. This is a lovely solitary spot, beside a rushing stream, among grey granite boulders grown with spruce and rhododendron; a veritable Rose of Sharon blooming in the desert. The wastes of the Bernina stretch above; and round about are leaguered some of the most forbidding, sharp-toothed peaks I ever saw. Onwards, across the silent snow, we glided in immitigable sunshine, through opening valleys and pine-woods, past the robber huts of Pisciadella, until at evenfall we rested in the roadside inn at Poschiavo.

IV.

The snow-path ended at Poschiavo; and when, as usual, we started on our journey next day at sunrise, it was in a carriage upon wheels. Yet even here we were in full midwinter. Beyond Le Prese, the lake presented one sheet of smooth, black ice, reflecting every peak and chasm of the mountains, and showing the rocks and water-weeds in the clear, green depths below. The glittering floor stretched away for acres of untenanted expanse, with not a skater to explore those dark, mysterious caves, or strike across the slanting sunlight poured from clefts in the impendent hills. Inshore, the substance of the ice sparkled here and there with iridescence (like the plumelets of a butterfly's wing under the microscope) wherever light happened to catch the jagged or oblique flaws that veined its solid crystal. From the lake, the road descends suddenly for a considerable distance through a narrow gorge, following a torrent which rushes among granite boulders. Chestnut trees begin to replace the pines. The sunnier terraces are planted with tobacco; and at a lower level, vines appear at intervals in patches. One comes at length to a great red gate across the road, which separates Switzerland from Italy, and where the export dues on wine are paid. The Italian Custom-house is romantically perched above the torrent. Two courteous and elegant finanzieri, mere boys, were sitting wrapped in their military cloaks and reading novels in the sun, as we drove up.

Though they made some pretence of examining the luggage, they excused themselves with sweet smiles and apologetic eyes-it was a disagreeable duty!

A short time brought us to the first village in the Valtelline, where the road bifurcates northward to Bormio and the Stelvio pass, southward to Sondrio and Lombardy. It is a little hamlet, known by the name of La Madonna di Tirano, having grown up round a pilgrimage church of great beauty-tall Lombard bell-tower, pierced with many tiers of pilastered windows, ending in a whimsical spire, and dominating a fantastic cupola-building of the earlier Renaissance. Taken altogether, this is a charming bit of architecture, picturesquely set beneath the granite snow-peaks of the Valtelline. The church, they say, was raised at Madonna's own command to stay the tide of heresy descending from the Engadine; and in the year 1620 the bronze statue of St. Michael, which still spreads wide its wings above the cupola, looked down upon the massacre of six hundred Protestants and foreigners, commanded by the patriot Jacopo Robustelli.

valley through a narrow We were now in the dis

From Madonna the road leads up the avenue of poplar-trees to the town of Tirano. trict where Forzato is made; and every vineyard had a name and history. In Tirano we betook ourself to the house of an old acquaintance of the Buol family, Bernardo da Campo, or, as the Graubündeners call him, Bernard Campbell. We found him at dinner with his son and grandchildren, in a vast, dark, bare Italian chamber. It would be difficult to find a more typical old Scotchman of the Lowlands than he looked, with his clean, close-shaven face, bright brown eyes, and snow-white hair escaping from a broad-brimmed hat. He might have sat to a painter for some Covenanter's portrait, except that there was nothing dour about him, or for an illustration to Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night." The air of probity and canniness combined, with a twinkle of dry humour, was completely Scotch; and when he tapped his snuff-box, telling stories of old days, I could not refrain from asking him about his pedigree. It should be said that there is a considerable family of Campells or Campbèlls in the Graubünden, who are fabled to deduce their stock from a Scotch Protestant of Zwingli's time; and this made it irresistible to imagine that in our friend Bernardo I had chanced upon a notable specimen of atavism. All he knew, however, was that his first ancestor had been a foreigner, who came across the mountains to Tirano two centuries ago.*

This old gentleman is a considerable wine-dealer. He sent us with his son, Giacomo, on a long journey underground through his cellars, where we tasted several sorts of Valtelline-especially the new Forzato, made a few weeks since, which singularly combines sweetness with

* The Grisons surname Campbell may possibly derive from the Romansch Campo Bello. The founder of the house was one Kaspar Campell, who in the first half of the sixteenth century preached the Reformed religion in the Engadine.

strength and both with a slight effervescence. It is certainly the sort of wine wherewith to tempt a Polyphemus, and not unapt to turn a giant's head! Leaving Tirano, and once more passing through the poplars of Madonna, we descended the valley, all along the vineyards of Villa, and the vast district of Sassella. Here and there, at wayside inns, we stopped to drink a glass of some particular vintage; and everywhere it seemed as though God Bacchus were at home. The whole valley on the right side of the Adda is one gigantic vineyard, climbing the hills in tiers and terraces, which justifies its Italian epithet of teatro di Bacco. The rock is a greyish granite, assuming sullen brown and orange tints where exposed to sun and weather. The vines are grown on stakes, not trellised over trees or carried across boulders, as is the fashion at Chiavenna or Terlan. Yet every advantage of the mountain is adroitly used; nooks and crannies being specially preferred, where the sun's rays are deflected from hanging cliffs. The soil seems deep, and is of a dull yellow tone. When the vines end, brushwood takes up the growth, which expires at last in crag and snow. Some alps and châlets, dimly traced against the sky, are evidences that a pastoral life prevails above the vineyards. Pan there stretches the pine-thyrsus down to vinegarlanded Dionysos.

The Adda flows majestically among willows in the midst, and the valley is nearly straight. The prettiest spot, perhaps, is at Tresenda or S. Giacomo, where a pass from Edolo and Brescia descends from the southern hills. But the Valtelline has no great claim to beauty of scenery. Its chief town, Sondrio, where we supped and drank some special wine called il vino de' Signori Grigioni, has been modernised in dull Italian fashion.

V.

The hotel at Sondrio, La Maddalena, was in Carnival uproar of masquers, topers, and musicians, all night through. It was as much as we could do to rouse the sleepy servants and get a cup of coffee, ere we started in the frozen dawn. Long experience only confirms the first impression that of all cold, the cold of an Italian winter is most penetrating. As we lumbered out of Sondrio in a heavy diligence, I could have fancied myself back once again at Radicofani or among the Ciminian hills. The frost was penetrating. Fur-coats would not keep it out; and we longed to be once more in open sledges on Bernina rather than enclosed in that cold coupé. Now we passed Grumello, the second largest of the renowned vine-districts; and always keeping the white mass of Monte di Disgrazia in sight, rolled at last into Morbegno. Here the Valtelline vintage properly ends, though much of the ordinary wine is probably supplied from the inferior produce of these fields.

It was past noon when we reached Colico, and saw the Lake of Como glittering in sunlight dazzling cloaks of snow on all the mountains, which look as dry and brown as dead beech-leaves at this season.

Our Bacchic

journey had reached its close; and it boots not here to tell in detail how we made our way across the Splügen, piercing its avalanches, by low-arched galleries scooped from the solid snow, and careering in our sledges down perpendicular snow-fields, which no one who has crossed that pass from the Italian side in winter, will forget. We left the refuge-station at the top together with a train of wine-sledges, and passed them in the midst. of the wild descent. Looking back, I saw two of their horses stumble in the plunge, and roll headlong over. Unluckily, in one of those somersaults a man was injured. Flung ahead into the snow by the first lurch, the sledge and wine-cask crossed him like a garden-roller. Had his bed been not of snow, he must have been crushed to death; and as it was, he presented a woeful appearance when he afterwards arrived at Splügen.

VI.

Though not strictly connected with the subject of this paper, I shall conclude these notes of winter wanderings in the High Alps with an episode which illustrates their curious vicissitudes.

It was late in the month of March; and nearly all the mountain roads were open for wheeled vehicles. A carriage and four horses came to meet us, at the termination of a railway journey, in Ragatz. We spent one day in visiting old houses of the Grisons aristocracy at Mayenfeld and Zizers, rejoicing in the early sunshine which had spread the fields with spring-flowers: primroses and oxlips, violets, anemones, and bright blue squills. At Chur we slept, and early next morning started for our homeward drive to Davos. Bad weather had declared itself in the night. It blew violently, and the rain soon changed to snow, frozen by a bitter north-blast. Crossing the dreary heath of Lenz was both magnificent and dreadful. By the time we reached Wiesen, all the forests were laden with snow, the roads deep in snow-drifts, the whole scene wintrier than it had been the winter through.

At Wiesen we should have stayed; for evening was fast setting in. But in ordinary weather it is only a two hours' drive from Wiesen to Davos. Our coachman made no objections to resuming the journey, and our four horses had but a light load to drag. So we telegraphed for supper to be prepared, and started between five and six.

A deep gorge has to be traversed, where the torrent cleaves its way between jaws of limestone precipices. The road is carried along ledges and through tunnels in the rock. Avalanches, which sweep this passage annually from the hills above, give it the name of Züge, or the Snow-Paths. As we entered the gorge, darkness fell, the horses dragged more heavily, and it soon became evident that our Tyrolese driver was hopelessly drunk. He nearly upset us twice by taking sharp turns in the road, banged the carriage against telegraph posts and jutting rocks, shaved the very verge of the torrent in places where there was no parapet, and, what was worst of all, refused to leave his box without a fight. The

darkness by this time was all but total, and a biinding snowstorm swept howling through the ravine. At length we got the carriage to a dead-stop, and floundered out in deep wet snow towards some wooden huts where miners in old days made their habitation. The place, by a curious, perhaps unconscious irony, is called Hoffnungsau, or the Meadow of Hope. Indeed it is not ill-named; for many wanderers, escaping, as we did, from the dreadful Gorge of Avalanches on a stormy night, may have felt, as we now felt, their hope reviving when they reached this shelter.

There was no light; nothing above, beneath, around, on any side, but tearing tempest and snow whirled through the ravine. The horses were taken out of the carriage; on their way to the stable (which fortunately in these mountain regions will be always found beside the poorest habitation) one of them fell back across a wall and nearly broke his spine. Hoffnungsau is inhabited all through the year. In its dismal, dark kitchen we found a knot of workmen gathered together, and heard there were two horses on the premises besides our own. It then occurred to us that we might accomplish the rest of the journey with such sledges as they bring the wood on from the hills in winter, if coalboxes or boxes of any sort could be provided. These should be lashed to the sledges and filled with hay. We were only four persons; my wife and a friend should go in one, myself and my little girl in the other. No sooner thought of, than put in practice. These original conveyances were improvised; and after two hours' halt at the Meadow of Hope, we all set forth again at half-past eight.

I have rarely felt anything more piercing than the grim cold of that journey. We crawled at a foot's pace through changeful snow-drifts. The road was obliterated, and it was my duty to keep a petroleum stablelamp swinging to illuminate the untracked wilderness. My little girl was snugly nested in the hay, and sound asleep with a deep white covering of snow above her. Meanwhile, the drift clave in frozen masses to our faces, lashed by a wind so fierce and keen that it was difficult to breathe it. My forehead-bone ached, as though with neuralgia, from the mere mask of icy snow upon it, plastered on with frost. Nothing could be seen but millions of white specks, whirled at us in eddying concentric circles. Not far from the entrance to the village, we met our house-folk out with lanterns to look for us. Their bewildered anxious faces, as they flashed the lanterns on our supine snow-piled bodies, taking us for dead or direly wounded, were a sight to see. It was past eleven at night, when at last we entered warm rooms, and refreshed ourselves for the tiring day with a jovial champagne supper. Horses, carriage, and drunken driver reached home next morning.

J. A. S.