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��SEVERAL SUNDAYS IN EUROPE.
��gorge about fourteen miles long, and ex- tends far up among the Alps, with a small village and several hotels at the farther end. The valley was inhabited by a rude peasantry several years before those English explorers, Windham and Pocoke, went thither in 1749. Until then even the people of Geneva did not know of the valley and its pastoral and hunting inhabitants. Upon the narrow fields of the Chamouny husbandmen the sun sheds few direct rays. Winter u lingers in the lap of May," and au- tumn is soon succeeded by the rigors of winter. Many of the men, trained from youth to the ascent of adjacent summits, so soon as they reach adult years be- come guides, and ever after, until too old for such laborious and hazardous service, are conductors of travellers to the pre- cipitous and awful heights amongst which these children of Chamouny are born, live and die. The nest of the ea- gle is never built so high that they can- not reach it; the wild chamois (goat) scales no cliff which they dare not at- tempt to reach. Many of these guides have made fifty and more excursions to the summit of Mont Blanc. Others of the male inhabitants devote their sum- mers to agriculture, and in the grazing season inhabit chalets— rough cottages far up the mountain sides — wherever a sufficient plateau of grass and other herbage can be found upon which cattle and goats may subsist. These chalets are inhabited only in the warm season, and then only by those who ascend to see to the cows and goats. How the dis- mal winters of the men, women and children of these mountain gorges are survived, is best known to Him " who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," and "without whose knowledge not even a sparrow falleth to the ground."
The sun was obscured by no cloud during the Saturday and Sunday we spent in the Vale of Chamouny ; and the weather, although September was more than half gone, was agreeable, so that the ascent of myself and another upon mules, to Mont Anvert — a spur of the Alps — afforded extreme satisfaction. From the windows and piazzas of the Union Hotel — for even this inhospitable
��valley, like our White Mountain region, has ample accommodations for summer excursionists — a complete view was ob- tained of the snow-capped summit of Mont Blanc, and from several stand-* points in the hamlet prospects of over- whelming grandeur are ever before the eye.
The Arve, a furious mountain stream, passes down the Vale of Chamouny, and moves, an impetuous, bubbling and tumbling current, to join, a little below Geneva, the beautiful Rhone, and thence move together for the distant Mediterra- nean. Not far from the hotels of Cha- mouny is the terminus of the immense glacier known as the Mer de Glace (Sea of Ice), beneath which issue the head waters of the Arve. The dwellings of the native inhabitants are rude, unpaint- ed, weather-stained cottages, and the roof-boards of the barns were, in 1850, confined by stones of from ten to twenty pounds weight. Behind the hamlet,with a broad avenue in front, were the Church and Priory — connected buildings, the lat- ter the abode of the ecclesiastic who is the guide of these rustic mountaineers. Near the valley are seen the lesser Al- pine peaks, and beyond them, in regular gradations of increasing altitude, other mountains, until the eye rests upon gran- ite shafts called " needles," rising sever- al thousand feet into the air; and high above all this congregation of mountains is discerned in the south-west the " awful mount." It was through impressions re- ceived here that Coleridge wrote that enduring production known as the " Hymn before sunrise in the Vale of Chamouny."
A tinkling bell upon the little stone church sent forth at frequent intervals its invitation to worshippers, and vil- lagers and strangers were constantly passing to and from its portals. The ever-present wax candles were burning all day upon the altar of the little edifice, just as they may always be seen in the most obscure as well as the most sump- tuous Catholic churches. Rude paint- ings were suspended back of the altar and at the sides of the church, and other figures upon canvass of Christ, the Holy Mother, the apostles, and others who
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