Switzerland every year does not in reality take any interest at all, or at best a very feeble one, in the only really national dish that Switzerland has to offer. They neither care for it, nor do they understand it. Naturally, therefore, the majority with their outside influence, with their own objects, ends, and atmosphere, entirely swamps the small remainder who appreciate the natural beauties of the land, and who fifty years ago practically held undivided possession. In those days the tourists, and they were few in the land, did not in the least mind suffering certain minor hardships owing to the absence of hotels: it was nothing compared with the pleasure that they obtained from the free life and the scenery; also, should they be mountaineers and scale some of the till then unvisited summits, on their descent into the valleys they were looked upon with wonder by the simple village folk and the herders of cattle of the small hamlets; these inhabitants would crowd round, when with arm extended and finger pointing to the distant peak of snow they described how yesterday, at such a time, they and their friend the chamois hunter of the district were on its summit. This sort of thing has most certainly gone, gone for ever. In this respect the Alps are as dead as Queen Anne--they have been overwhelmed in the waters of oblivion. The self-sufficient modern traveller now holds undivided sway in the chief central places of the Alps; and were it possible for him to impress his puny individuality on the great crags and the snow-fields of the mountains, to interfere with the colours of the sunset or the dawn, or to compel the clouds, then perhaps we might agree with the bitter cry of Ruskin, who, speaking of the artistic creative faculty of the present day, says that we 'live in an age of base conceit and baser servility--an age whose intellect is chiefly formed by pillage, and occupied in desecration; one day mimicking, the next destroying, the works of all noble persons who made its intellectual or art life possible to it: an age without honest confidence enough in itself to carve a cherry-stone with an original fancy, but with insolence enough to abolish the solar system, if it were allowed to meddle with it.' Fortunately they cannot meddle with the mountains and the snow-fields. Still, as in those bygone days, man there is a mere speck. The peaks are as high and the snows as deep. Above, the glories of the sunset and the sunrise are the same, amidst the ice, the snow, and the black rocks; there the taint, and the adverse influence of this invasion of civilisation, is unfelt, although it may have overwhelmed the valleys below. The Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn still are as untouched and unspoiled, as far from vulgarisation as in the days when they were first conquered.