The grandest sight in Berne is the range of Bernese Alps, and a grander spectacle, perhaps, the country itself cannot present. When that long, white, rifted, mountain-boundary of the world stands up in its majesty, lighted as we saw it by a blazing noonday sun, it is sublime as well as beautiful. [Illustration: ON THE LAKE OF THUN.] It is only an hour by rail to Thun, and then we are on a lovely little lake ten miles long, with lofty mountains on each side of it; so lovely indeed is this lake, that days after we had left it, when other views were spoken of, Thun always had its admiring advocates, who claimed for it the pre-eminence in beauty over all that we had seen. And so in this land of glorious natural scenery, where every valley is a subject for a picture, every mountain a study, and every lake a gem, it is easy to exhaust the words of admiration, and then fail to convey any adequate idea of the constant succession of splendors that greet the traveller’s never-wearied eye. Writing these last words, I look up, and before me is the Jungfrau, clothed in white raiment from crown to foot. The sky kisses her cold brow. As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so are the everlasting hills about her now and ever. But no words can give to you, beyond the sea, the faintest conception of what one feels who exposes his soul to these visions of grandeur and beauty, and rejoices as he thinks “My _Father_ made them all.” CHAPTER XVI. THE BRUNIG PASS—LUCERNE. IF it were required of me to name the pleasantest day’s ride thus far of this summer’s tour in Switzerland, I should give the palm for beauty to the day that took me with two friends from Interlaken to Lucerne by way of Brienz and the Brunig Pass.