een short:
they would have been shot at the next station, to a certainty.

With the night, the dream-like landscape, and the maledictory harangues
which had haunted me during the darkness, passed away, and the morning
found us nearing the mountains. The Alps open upon you by little. One
who has never climbed these hills imagines himself standing at their
feet, and looking up the long unbroken vista of fields, vineyards,
forests, and naked rocks, to the eternal snows of their summit. Not so.
They do not come marching thus upon you in all their grandeur to
overwhelm you. To see them thus, you must stand afar off,--at least
fifty miles away. There you can take in the whole at a glance, from the
beauteous fringe of stream, and hamlet, and woodland, that skirts their
base, to the white serrated line that cuts so sharply the blue of the
firmament. Nearer them,--unless, indeed, in the great central valleys,
where you can see the icy fields hanging in the firmament at an awful
distance above you,--their snow-clad summits are invisible, being hidden
by an intervening sea of ridges, that are strewn over with rocks, or
wave darkly with pines.

As we approached the mountains, they offered to the eye a beauteous
chain of verdant hills, with the morning mists hanging on their sides.
The torrents were in flood from the recent rains; the woods had the rich
tints of autumn upon them; but the charm of the scene lay in the
beautiful festoonings of the vine. The uplands before me were barred by
what I at first took to be long horizontal layers of fleecy cloud. On a
nearer approach, these turned out to be the long branchy arms of the
vine. The vine-stock is made to lean against the cut trunk of a chestnut
or poplar tree, and its branches are bent horizontally, and extended
till they meet those of the neighbouring vine-stock, which have been
similarly dealt with. In this way, continuous lines of luxuriant
foliage, with pendulous blood-red clusters in their season, may be made
to run for miles together along the hill-side. There might be from
thirty to forty parallel lines in those I now saw. Tinted with the
morning sun, and relieved against the deep verdure of the mountain, they
appeared like stripes of amber, or floating lines of cloud fringed with
gold.

It was the Mont Cenis route I was traversing,--the least rugged of all
the passes of the Alps, and the same by which Hannibal, as some suppose,
passed into Italy. The day cleared up int