V. THE SIMPLON 323

indeed, all the year round; no travelling from it to fairer lands possible; no shutting up for seasons in town; hay-time and fruit-time, school-time and play, for generation after generation, within the cheerful white domicile with its green shutters and shingle roof,-pinnacled perhaps, humorously, at the corners, glittering on the edges with silvery tin. “Kept up” the whole place, and all the neighbours’ places, not ostentatiously, but perfectly: enough gardeners to mow, enough vintagers to press, enough nurses to nurse; no foxes to hunt, no birds to shoot; but every household felicity possible to prudence and honour, felt and fulfilled from infancy to age.

86. Where the grounds came down to the waterside, they were mostly built out into it, till the water was four or five feet deep, lapping up, or lashing, under breeze; against the terrace wall. Not much boating; fancy wherries, unmanageable, or too adventurous, upon the wild blue; and Swiss boating a serious market and trade business, unfashionable in the high rural empyrean of Geneva. But between the Hôtel des Étrangers, (one of these country-houses open to the polite stranger, some half-mile out of the gates, where Salvador¹ took us in ’33 and ’35) and the town, there were one or two landing-places for the raft-like flat feluccas; and glimpses of the open lake and things beyond,-glimpses only, shut off quickly by garden walls, until one came to the inlet of lake-water moat which bent itself under the ramparts back to the city gate. This was crossed, for people afoot who did not like going round to that main gate, by the delicatest of filiform suspension bridges; strong enough it looked to carry a couple of lovers over in safety, or a nursemaid and children, but nothing heavier. One was allowed to cross it for a centime, which seemed to me always a most profitable transaction, the portress receiving placidly a sort of dirty flattened sixpence, (I forget its name) and returning me a

¹ [The courier: see above, pp. 84, 111, 112.]

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