"I have your three letters, with pleasant accounts of critiques, etc., and painful accounts of your anxieties. I certainly never thought of putting in a letter at Sion, as I arrived there about three hours after Fister left me, it being only two stages from Martigny; and besides, I had enough to do that morning in thinking what I should want at Zermatt, and was engaged at Sion, while we changed horses, in buying wax candles and rice. It was unlucky that I lost post at Visp," etc. A few days later he says: "On Friday I had such a day as I have only once or twice had the like of among the Alps. I got up to a promontory projecting from the foot of the Matterhorn, and lay on the rocks and drew it at my ease. I was about three hours at work as quietly as if in my study at Denmark Hill, though on a peak of barren crag above a glacier, and at least 9,000 feet above sea. But the Matterhorn, after all, is not so fine a thing as the aiguille Dru, nor as any one of the aiguilles of Chamouni: for one thing, it is all of secondary rock in horizontal beds, quite rotten and shaly; but there are other causes of difference in impressiveness which I am endeavouring to analyze, but find considerable embarrassment in doing so. There seems no sufficient reason why an isolated obelisk, one-fourth higher than any of them, should not be at least as sublime as they in their dependent grouping; but it assuredly is not. For this reason, as well as because I have not found here the near studies of primitive rock I expected,--for to my great surprise, I find the whole group of mountains, mighty as they are, except the inaccessible Monte Rosa, of secondary limestones or slates,--I should like, if it were possible, to spend a couple of days more on the Montanvert, and at the bases of the Chamouni aiguilles, sleeping at the Montanvert." And so on, apologetically begging (as other sons beg money) for _time_, to gather the material of "Modern Painters," volume iv. "I hope you will think whether the objects you are after are worth risks of sore throats or lungs," replied his father, for he had "personified a perpetual influenza" until they got him to Switzerland, and they were very anxious; indeed, Pfister's news from Martigny had scared his mother--not very well herself--into wild plans for recapturing him. However, Osborne Gordon was going to Chamouni with Mr. Pritchard, and so they gave him a little longer; and he made the best use of his time: "_Monday evening (August_ 20, 1849). "MY DEAREST FATHER,