If you enter any of these villages, the narratives of snow storms, of falling precipices, and “Lavines,” as avalanches are called, meet you at every step. They are the great topics of these communities, as the movements of Politics or the vacillations of the Bourse are elsewhere. Scarcely one who has reached the middle term of life has not been, at least once, in the most imminent peril; and these things are talked of as the common accidents of existence, the natural risks of humanity! Very strange does it sound to us who discuss so eagerly the perils of a wooden pavement in our thoroughfares! It is curious, too, to hear, as one may, most authentically, the length of time life can be preserved beneath the snow. Individuals have been buried so long as three entire days, and yet taken out alive. The cold, of which it would be supposed they had suffered dreadfully, seems scarcely very great; and the porous nature of the snow, and possibly the chinks and crevices left between falling masses, have usually left air sufficient for respiration. That individuals in such circumstances of peril are not, always at least, devoid of their exercise of the faculties, I remember one instance which is sufficiently convincing. It was in the Via Mala, about five miles from the village of Splügen, where, in the year 1829, the little cabriolet that conveyed the mail was swept away by an avalanche. The calamity was not known for full seven or eight hours afterwards, when some travellers from Andeer reaching the spot, found the road blocked up by snow, and perceived a portion of the wooden rail of the road, and a fragment of a horse-harness adhering to it, half-way down the precipice. The guides of the party, well accustomed to reason from such sad premises, at once saw what had happened. Conceiving, however, that the driver had been carried down over the cliff, and consequently to certain death, they directed their sole care to clearing a passage for the travellers. In so doing, they proceeded with long poles to sound the snow, and ascertain to what depth it lay unhardened. It was in one of these “explorations,” and when the pole had sunk above ten feet deep into a mass of soft unfrozen snow, that the man who held it found himself unable to withdraw the staff, and called his comrades to aid him. They soon perceived, however, that the resistance gradually yielded, and from the instinct peculiar to the “hand”--another illustration for Sir Charles Bell--they recognised that it must be the grip of human fingers which held the other end of the pole. They immediately began to excavate on the spot, and in half an hour liberated the poor postilion of the mail car, who, although hearing the shouts and cries of the party for nearly an hour over his head, could not succeed in making his own voice heard, and but for the fortunate accident of the pole must have perished.