Bernard, nine; and on the Théodule Pass, always. Upon first beholding the peaks of the Alps, shrouded in their everlasting mantles of snow, one would little dream that in the valleys beneath ran musical streams of summer water, with emerald meadows spreading their velvet cloaks, dappled with clustering rose-bush, and the sun-loving flowers of the gardens of the tropics. In ancient times writers exhausted their eloquence in painting the horrors of the climate of the Alps. Livy wrote, “and the snows almost mingling with the sky, the shapeless huts situated on the cliffs, the cattle and beasts of burden withered by the cold, the men unshorn and wildly dressed, all things, animate and inanimate, stiffened with frost, and other objects more terrible to be seen than described, renew their alarm.”[9] To-day, within its habitable regions, the climate is distinguished for being generally temperate, healthful, and invigorating. It enjoys, from its geographical smallness, immunity from the penalty a vast continent pays in colossal visitations and vicissitudes of meteorological conditions. The Föhn is a remarkable local wind in Switzerland; it is a strong southwest or south wind, very hot and dry, formerly supposed to originate in the Sahara, and flowing in towards the area of low atmospheric pressure; or to be a tropical counter-current of the trade winds. Meteorologists now hold that it is engendered by local causes. Commencing its descent in the northern valleys with a high temperature, it necessarily increases its temperature and dryness as it passes into the higher pressure of lower levels; it sweeps through certain valleys, especially in Glarus and Uri, where old laws enact that when it blows, every fire in the place, for whatever purpose used, is to be extinguished, for its violence is often extreme. It is much dreaded, yet acts beneficially by a rapid polar-like awakening of nature; it is it which melts most of the snow in the spring, and “without the Föhn,” says the peasant of the Grisons, “neither God nor the golden sun would prevail over the snow.” The Bise is the opposite of the Föhn, a cold, biting north wind, whose tooth has been sharpened by its passage over the ice-fields, bringing all the chills of Siberia, and searching one through and through, eating into the very marrow. This wind is confined within a narrow area of the country, pouring from the northeast over the Boden-See, and along the Jura to the Lake of Geneva below Lausanne; its effect is blighting on the pastures, which it sometimes visits at untimely seasons, killing even cattle exposed to it in May.