V. THE SIMPLON 335

économie; je voyois notre hote de Macugnaga, qui n’étoit rien moins que pauvre, aller tous les soirs prendre, dans un endroit fermé à clef, une pincée d’aulx dont il distribuoit gravement une gousse à sa femme, et autant à chacun de ses enfants, et cette gousse d’ail étoit I’assaisonnement unique d’un morceau de pain see qu’ils brisoient entre deux pierres, & qu’ils mangeoient pour leur souper. Ceux d’entr’eux qui négocient au dehors, viennent au moins une fois tous les deux ans passer quelques mois dans leur village; et quoique hors de chez eux ils prennent l’habitude d’une meilleure nourriture, ils se remettent sans peine à celle de leur pays, et ne le quittent qu’avec un extrême regret; j’ai été témoin d’un ou deux de ces départs, qui m’ont attendri jusqu’aux larmes.”

99. By the morning, however, our hosts had found some meat for the over-greedy foreigners, and the wine was good enough; but it was no place for papa and mamma to stay in; and, bravado apart, I liked black bread no better than they. So we went up to the Riffelberg, where I saw that on the north Monte Rosa was only a vast source of glacier, and, as a mountain, existed only for the Italian side: the Matterhorn was too much of an Egyptian obelisk to please me (I trace continually the tacit reference in my Cumberland-built soul to moorish Skiddaw and far-sweeping Saddle-back as the proper types of majestic form); and I went down to Visp again next day without lamentation: my mother, sixty-three on next 2nd September, walking with me the ten miles from St. Nicholas to Visp as lightly as a girl. And the old people went back to Brieg with me, that I might climb the Bel Alp (then unknown¹), whence I drew the panorama of the Simplon and Bernese range, now in Walkley Museum.² But the more I got, the more I asked. After drawing the Weisshorn and Aletsch-horn, I wanted to see the Aiguille Verte again, and was given another fortnight for Chamouni; the old people staying at the Trois Couronnes of Vevay. I spent the days usefully, going first up to the base of the Aiguille d’Argentière, which commands the glorious white ocean of the Tours glacier below, and, opposite, the four precipices of the Aiguille Verte on its north-east flank; and that day, 27th

¹ [The inn on the Bel Alp was not opened till 1860.]

² [See Vol. XXX. p. 233, and compare Vol. XXVI. p. 222.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]