518 PRÆTERITA-III

so far with me when I was intent on the higher hills,- waiting, they, and our old servant, Lucy Tovey,¹ (whom we took abroad with us sometimes that she might see the places we were always talking of,) until I had done my bit of drawing or hammering, and we all went down together, through the vineyards, to four o’clock dinner; then the evening was left free for me to study the Dent d’Oche and chains of crag declining southwards to Geneva, by sunset.

Thus Vevay, year after year, became the most domestic of all our foreign homes. At Venice, my mother always thought the gondola would upset; at Chamouni, my father, that I should fall into the Mer de Glace; at Pisa, he would ask me, “What shall I give the coachman?”² and at Florence, dispute the delightfulness of Cimabue. But at Vevay, we were all of a mind. My father was professionally at home in the vineyards,-sentimentally in the Bosquet de Julie;³ my mother liked apple orchards and narcissus meads as much as I did; and for me, there was the Dent du Midi, for eternal snow, in the distance; the Rochers de Naye, for climbing, accessibly near; Chillon for history and poetry; and the lake, in the whole breadth of it from Lausanne to Meillerie, for Turnerian mist effects of morning, and Turnerian sunsets at evening; and moonlights,-as if the moon were one radiant glacier of frozen gold. Then if one wanted to go to Geneva for anything, there were little steamers,-no mortal would believe, now, how little; one used to be afraid an extra basket of apples would be too much for them, when the pier was full of market people. They called at all the places along the north shore, mostly for country folks; and often their little cabins were quite empty. English people thought the lake of Geneva too dull, if they had ever more than an hour of it.

¹ [For whom, see above, p. 343.]

² [See above, p. 419.]

³ [At Clarens, three miles from Vevay, described by Rousseau in the Nouvelle Héloïse.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]