At the top of the mountains there is snow, soft, regular snow, which slides down fissures, and which, as it gets down the slides, changes from snow to ice. It melts slowly all the Summer, the water seeking the bottom of the field of ice, but its thickness being constantly maintained by fresh supplies of snow from the top. [Sidenote: THE RHONE.] This water brings out of the mountains all sorts of material, rocks and earth, which fill the streams that come down the mountain side in swiftly flowing streams which lose themselves in the river in the valley below. The Rhone flows past Sion, Martigny, Bex, and other points, till it falls into Lake Leman, as beautiful an inland body of water as there is in Europe, and almost as beautiful as some of the American lakes. Before and at its entrance into the lake, the water of the Rhone is as muddy as the Mississippi at St. Louis. It is about the color of cheap restaurant coffee, but the lake acts as a great settling bed, or filter, or both; and by the time the water finds itself in its new location it becomes the most pure and limpid of any in Europe. The water in the lake, which was so muddy and discolored in the river above, becomes so pure and limpid that the fish may be seen disporting themselves in its lowest depths, and the minute pebbles on the bottom are distinctly to be seen. Geneva is at the lower point of the lake, and the Rhone, which was buried in it at the upper end, is resurrected at Geneva, and issues therefrom in a stream of fearful rapidity. The waters spring out from the lake with a fall that would be called rapids in America, and rush through the city actually singing as if with joy at its deliverance. It rushes out as if it spurned all impediments of shore that kept it into a well-behaved and quiet lake, and as if anxious to get the freedom of rushing through the valleys, over rocks, and tumbling around generally in a free and easy way till it runs its race and loses itself forever in the common sepulchre of all rivers, the great sea. Laundrying is done in Geneva as it is in Paris. Anchored in the river are large boats arranged for wash houses. In these floating temples are furnaces which supply hot water, and plank tables at which the washerwomen do their work. The garment is taken and swashed in the hot water of the floating laundry, then they are religiously and conscientiously soaped, and placed upon these thick tables, and pounded with a wooden paddle till the soap and water is driven completely through them. Then they are rinsed in the swift running water of the Rhone, and pounded more, and rinsed and rinsed again, till they come out as white as the snow from which comes the water.