“I will never see her again,” he said to me long days afterward. “Like all beautiful, changing things, she has become a part of the beautiful universe. I know her breath will be in the perfume of the flowers, and she will linger in the summer wind.” He spoke in sincerity, but the beauty and poetry of his belief had little comfort for us, who also had lost, but with an absolute faith that we should find our buried one again. In one of our little excursions, Professor Kinkel took us to see the celebrated actress, Caroline Bauer, now the Countess Plater. She and her husband, a rich Pole, who has good claims on the throne of Poland, live on an estate overlooking Lake Zurich. They received us all with great courtesy, and insisted on our having lunch with them on the terrace. The whole estate, not large, is surrounded by a high stone wall, and inside of that a line of trees and hedges higher still. The Countess is seventy, white haired, good looking, genial and happy as a girl. She played several airy things on the piano for us, and would have danced a jig, I think, had Professor Kinkel but said the word. In her heyday of beauty and fame she was the morganatic wife of the King of Belgium. But little was thought of that, for she showed us his picture hanging in the drawing-room, with pride. She and Kinkel talked and laughed much about things that were Greek to us. When we were leaving, the white-haired old beauty followed the white-haired old poet out to the garden gate, and gave him a good-by kiss. It was, in fact, a pretty and touching scene. The Count owns the great Castle of Rapperschwyl at the end of the lake. It contains a Polish museum. One Fourth of July, later, he invited all the Americans to celebrate the day there, and sent a steamer, with music and flags, to carry us up to his banquet. The flags of lost Poland were intertwined with the flags of the United States. _August, 1871._--Next to Westminster Abbey, in London, I have always wanted to see the St. Bernard pass, with its hospice and its dogs. At Martigny, the other day, my wife and I hired a man and a mule to help us up the pass that gave Bonaparte so much trouble. The man’s name was “Christ.” He often addressed the mule as “you diable.” We walked, rode and climbed past the most poverty-stricken villages in the Dranse valley I ever saw in my life. This should be called the valley of human wretchedness. We reached the famous stone hospice on the top of the pass late at night, in a storm of sleet, and tired to death. We had overtaken a German student on the way, and our poor mule had to drag or carry four of us up the worst part of the pass. The thunderstorm also made us overdo ourselves. My wife sat on the saddle; the student hung to the mule’s tail; I hung to one stirrup, and Christ to the other. I am glad it was dark, for the scene was not heroic, like that of Napoleon leading his army over the mountains.