villages; whilst the Iron Age is represented by tridents, shears, safety-pins with spiral springs, choppers with hooked points, and reaping-hooks, many of which exactly resemble those still in use at the present day: the persistence of shape is really marvellous. Here too are long, deadly pins, with big bead heads, precisely like those that women still stick through their hats to-day, though the world is more than two thousand years older. Here too are human tibia bones, each with its four bronze anklets still _in situ_, and here is one end of a "dug-out" canoe that was found in the lake, at Morges, in 1878. Some museums of this sort are distinctly dismal; but this at Geneva is so rich in this particular direction, and so admirably marshalled, that even those who are little interested in origins will not regret an hour's loss of sunshine on lake and hill. [Illustration: SUNSET ON MONT BLANC, FROM ABOVE GENEVA.] II. I suppose one is justified, or even compelled, in writing even a short sketch, such as this, of Geneva and its lake, to say something of the valleys that penetrate southward from its basin into the mountain highlands of Savoy. The man is to be pitied who can gaze at the distant snows of Mont Blanc, or the Aiguille-du-Midi, from the quays at Geneva, yet is stirred by no violent passion to view them at closer quarters: who can linger by the junction of blue Rhone and turbid Avre, where the streams for a space flow parallel, but do not consent to mix, yet experiences no impulse to track up the Avre itself to its majestic source, where it issues in volume and thunder ("magno cum murmure montis") from the foot of the Mer-de-Glace. Few writers, in short, on Geneva fail to conduct their readers to the bleak upland vale of Chamonix; where they may worship "at the temple's inner shrine" what they have worshipped so long at a distance, in the Galilee, or vestibule. I do not, however, propose to expend a deal of space in dealing with the usual line of approach to Chamonix by way of Bonneville and the Baths of St. Gervais, or even on Chamonix itself. Nearly thirty years ago, when I first travelled between the two towns, but in the reverse direction, it was necessary to drive by diligence the whole distance between Geneva and Chamonix: now the journey that took formerly a whole long summer day is easily effected in a few short hours, and the old, leisurely, unrestricted view from the coupé of the diligence is bartered away for a series of flying glimpses--and hardly that, if the compartment is full--framed for half a minute, and lost before fairly realized; seen, like the film of a cinematograph, amid surroundings equally stifling and dull. From St. Gervais, it is true, where the ordinary railway terminates and the electric line begins, you may stand, if you like, on the open platform at the end of the little carriage, and marvel thence, as you mount steeply, at the depth of the wooded gorge below you, and at the fierce waters of the