In travelling in Italy in 1851, my father took a chimney-pot hat to wear in the large towns, and he writes home on 9 September that another must be brought down to meet him on his reaching London, as he had given this away on going to the mountains. “It had become such an incumbrance that I gave it away to-day to a poor old man at Ala: he had a crowd soon around to see him in his new covering, for which he was very grateful.” He no longer took a chimney-pot, when I began to go abroad with him--1867--but I have seen chimney-pots since then in most unlikely places. On 20 March 1882 I met an American near Jericho with chimney-pot and black frock-coat and everything to match: he said it was the best costume God ever made. On 28 December 1909 I met a Hindu on the cone of Mount Vesuvius; and he wore a chimney-pot and a very loud check suit. Writing from Interlaken on 17 August 1849, my father says, “You would be amused at seeing what monkies the fashionable gentlemen do make of themselves in dress: perhaps one dressed like a mountaineer, or William Tell, will wear white kid gloves, or thin patent boots, or some other incongruity equally ridiculous.” People do things better now: even invalids are fully dressed for climbing. Accidents in travelling were commoner then than now, and people took them more as matters of course. In an old diary here one page reads as follows, July 1850:--“17, Schaffhausen. 18, Zurich. 19, Lucerne. 20, do. 21, Escholzmatt. 22, Interlaken. 23, Lauterbrunnen, here I had the misfortune to fall over the Wengern Alp and break my leg, and was confined to my bed at this place 11 days, and then at Interlaken till Septr. 21. Expenses at hotels 730 francs, surgeon 330 do.--1060. 21, left Interlaken for Berne. 22, Berne. 23, Soleure. 24, Basle.” Writing to my father on 26 July “on my bed at Lauterbrunnen,” he takes it all quite calmly, just adding, “I shall have seen enough of snow and waterfalls.... How much more beautiful is the sweet vale of Lustleigh.” Plenty of people went to Switzerland at the time when I first went--1869--far more than when my father went there thirty years before, but nothing like the crowds that go there now. They kept more to peaks and passes then; and they were always talking of Hannibal’s passage of the Alps. Junius was talked out: Tichborne and Dreyfus were yet to come; and Hannibal filled the gap. I used to hear them at home as well as there; and they all had their pet routes for Hannibal--Col d’Argentière, Mont Genèvre, Mont Cenis, Little Mont Cenis, Little St Bernard and Great St Bernard, and even Simplon and St Gothard. In 1871 I went looking for traces of the vinegar on the Great St Bernard. My father upheld the Cenis routes as the only passes from which you can look down upon the plains of Italy. I doubt if Hannibal did look down. I think he may have shown his men their line of march upon a map, just as Aristagoras used a map to show the Spartans their line of march 282 years earlier.