latest news and personal report, on the strength of which several days
passed without letters, but not without a remonstrance from
headquarters. On August 8 he writes from Zermatt:

"I have your three letters, with pleasant accounts of critiques,
etc., and painful accounts of your anxieties. I certainly never
thought of putting in a letter at Sion, as I arrived there about
three hours after Fister left me, it being only two stages from
Martigny; and besides, I had enough to do that morning in thinking
what I should want at Zermatt, and was engaged at Sion, while we
changed horses, in buying wax candles and rice. It was unlucky that
I lost post at Visp," etc.

A few days later he says:

"On Friday I had such a day as I have only once or twice had the
like of among the Alps. I got up to a promontory projecting from
the foot of the Matterhorn, and lay on the rocks and drew it at my
ease. I was about three hours at work as quietly as if in my study
at Denmark Hill, though on a peak of barren crag above a glacier,
and at least 9,000 feet above sea. But the Matterhorn, after all,
is not so fine a thing as the aiguille Dru, nor as any one of the
aiguilles of Chamouni: for one thing, it is all of secondary rock
in horizontal beds, quite rotten and shaly; but there are other
causes of difference in impressiveness which I am endeavouring to
analyze, but find considerable embarrassment in doing so. There
seems no sufficient reason why an isolated obelisk, one-fourth
higher than any of them, should not be at least as sublime as they
in their dependent grouping; but it assuredly is not. For this
reason, as well as because I have not found here the near studies
of primitive rock I expected,--for to my great surprise, I find the
whole group of mountains, mighty as they are, except the
inaccessible Monte Rosa, of secondary limestones or slates,--I
should like, if it were possible, to spend a couple of days more on
the Montanvert, and at the bases of the Chamouni aiguilles,
sleeping at the Montanvert."

And so on, apologetically begging (as other sons beg money) for _time_,
to gather the material of "Modern Painters," volume iv.

"I hope you will think whether the objects you are after are worth risks
of sore throats or lungs," replied his father, for he had "personified a
perpetual in