I must get in about the people one meets. The man who did not like parrots because they were too intelligent. And the man who told me that Handel’s _Messiah_ was “très chic,” and the smell of the cyclamens “stupendous.” And the man who said it was hard to think the world was not more than 6000 years old, and we encouraged him by telling him we thought it must be even more than 7000. And the English lady who said of some one that “being an artist, you know, of course he had a great deal of poetical feeling.” And the man who was sketching and said he had a very good eye for colour in the light, but would I be good enough to tell him what colour was best for the shadows. “An amateur,” he said, “might do very decent things in water-colour, but oils require genius.” So I said: “What is genius?” “Millet’s picture of the _Angelus_ sold for 700,000 francs. Now that,” he said, “is genius.” After which I was very civil to him. At Bellinzona a man told me that one of the two towers was built by the Visconti and the other by Julius Cæsar, a hundred years earlier. So, poor old Mrs. Barratt at Langar could conceive no longer time than a hundred years. The Trojan war did not last ten years, but ten years was as big a lie as Homer knew. We went over the Albula Pass to St. Moritz in two diligences and could not settle which was tonic and which was dominant; but the carriage behind us was the relative minor. There was a picture in the dining-room but we could not get near enough to see it; we thought it must be either Christ disputing with the Doctors or Louis XVI saying farewell to his family—or something of that sort. The Sacro Monte at Varese The Sacro Monte is a kind of ecclesiastical Rosherville Gardens, eminently the place to spend a happy day. The processions were best at the last part of the ascent; there were pilgrims, all decked out with coloured feathers, and priests and banners and music and crimson and gold and white and glittering brass against the cloudless blue sky. The old priest sat at his open window to receive the offerings of the devout as they passed, but he did not seem to get more than a few bambini modelled in wax. Perhaps he was used to it. And the band played the barocco music on the barocco little piazza and we were all barocco together. It was as though the clergymen at Ladywell had given out that, instead of having service as usual, the congregation would go in procession to the Crystal Palace with all their traps, and that the band had been practising “Wait till the clouds roll by” for some time, and on Sunday, as a great treat, they should have it.