wood, on account of the ice, impressed an image on her mind's eye time would take long to obliterate, if it ever could. Bale seemed the first really foreign looking town, and the houses not unlike those of the old town of Edinburgh, though certainly more neat and clean, quite took the love of her Caledonian mind. On the following evening Ellen hailed Lucerne on its own beautiful lake; and if Bale had pleased, Lucerne charmed her. Here they lingered a day and saw the strange Kapell Bruecke, with its pictures of the deeds of saints and warriors of Swiss celebrity, and, more wonderful still, the monumental lion, sculptured out of the living rock in commemoration of the brave Swiss guard, slaughtered in defending the Tuileries in 1792. The aspect of the dying lion, with the broken spear in its side, from which is welling his life-blood, yet defending in its dying agonies the shield of France, is the most touching and beautiful design ever perfected by art. But it was not these, nor the pretty village, that charmed Ellen, it was the lake so still, so green, so transparent--it was the mountain guards that rose around--the rocky mountain where tradition says the unhappy Pilate ended a miserable existence, and which still bears his name, and is nearly always the resting-place of clouds, whilst every other hill shows clear, as if an evil nature belonged to it--Rigi, cut out against the clear blue sky, on whose summit yonder knoll, diminished by its height to a mole-hill, is the grand hotel which wayfarers up this hill rest at--and further up the lake still glimpses of the higher Alps of Schwytz and Engelberg, with their diadems of everlasting snow;--it was these, and other hills all mirrored in the still lake, that shone like a looking-glass below, that charmed the Scotch eye, to which all scenery, lacking the Scotch hills, is tame and domestic. Early next morning, having procured a boat and two strong Swiss rowers, our travellers were pulled up the lake as far as Kussnacht, a small Alpine village at the foot of the Rigi, from which village they were to make the ascent. Ellen, seated on a sure-footed Swiss pony, with a sturdy boy to guide it, and Mr. Ravensworth and Jean with their Alpenstocks, both excellent mountaineers, soon accomplished the ascent, neither very difficult nor arduous; but ere they reached the summit they were enveloped in clouds that drifted thicker and thicker around them, and precluded all hopes of seeing the sunset; rather a disappointment, but a very common one to Alpine mountain climbers. The merry conversation of a large party composed of English, Germans, Americans, and a few French and Italians, and the excellent table d'hote passed away a long evening very happily, and all retired with the hopes that Sol would be more auspicious next morning.