XI. L’HOTEL DU MONT BLANC 453

drawn by the sun. A thing to be proud of still, though he is now a justice of peace, somewhere in Australia.

222. The following entries, in June, of which the two last come in the midst of busy and otherwise happy days, are all with which I permit myself to trouble the reader for this time:-

“CHAMOUNI, Sunday, June 17th.-Quiet south rain till twelve o’clock. I have been abstracting the book of Revelation, (they say the French are beaten again at Rome,¹ and another revolution in Paris); many signs seem to multiply around us, and yet my unbelief yields no more than when all the horizon was clear. I was especially struck with the general appellation of the system of the world as the ‘Mystery of God,’ Chap. x. 7, compared with Hebrews xi. 6, which I read this morning in our usual course.* Theme enough for the day’s thought.

“Half-past five. Pouring still, but I got out before dinner during a fine blink, which lasted just long enough to let me, by almost running, and leaping all the streams, reach the end of the pine wood next the source of the Arveron. There I had to turn to the left to the wooden bridge, when behold a sight new to me; an avalanche had evidently taken place from the (upper) glacier into the very bed of the great cataract, and the stream was as nearly choked as could be with balls and ellipsoids of ice, from the size of its common

* Read the 5th, 6th, and 7th verses in succession:-“And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: but in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as He hath declared to His servants the prophets.”

¹ [In one of the engagements of Garibaldi’s defence of the Roman Republic against the Pope and the French. Another revolution did not, however, break out in Paris.]

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