[Illustration: _Of A Mule's Head Lowered, With Ears Flattened._]

At length we opened on the Rhone valley; and at seven we reached Hotel de la Tour, at Martigny.

Here H. and S. managed to get up two flights of stone stairs, and sank speechless and motionless upon their beds. I must say they have exhibited spirit to-day, or, as Mr. C. used to say, "pluck." After settling with our guides, - fine fellows, whom we hated to lose, - I ordered supper, and sought new guides for our route to the convent. Our only difficulty in reaching there, they say, is the _snow_. The guides were uncertain whether mules could get through so early in the season. Only to think! To-day, riding broilingly through hay-fields - to-morrow, stuck in snow drifts!

LETTER XXXV.

Dear Henry: -

You cannot think how beautiful are these Alpine valleys. Our course, all the first morning after we left Chamouni, lay beside a broad, hearty, joyous mountain torrent, called, perhaps from the darkness of its waters, Eau Noire. Charming meadows skirted its banks. All the way along I could think of nothing but Bunyan's meadows beside the river of life, "curiously adorned with lilies." _These_ were curiously adorned, broidered, and inwrought with flowers, many and brilliant as those in a western prairie. Were I to undertake to describe them, I might make an inventory as long as Homer's list of the ships. There was the Canterbury bell of our garden; the white meadow sweet; the blue and white campanula; the tall, slender harebell, and a little, short-tufted variety of the same, which our guide tells me is called "Les Clochettes," or the "little bells" - fairies might ring them, I thought.

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