o each coach,
attached tandem, and we stopped at the queer relay-house there some
thirty minutes. Here some women in the garb of nuns served me some soup
with grated cheese, a compound which suggested a dishcloth in flavor,
yet it was very good. I will not attempt to reconcile the two
statements. After the soup I went out to see the Alps. The ecstatic
Briton was still eating and drinking, and I could enjoy the scene
unmolested. I crossed a little bridge near the inn. The night was cold
and bright. Hundreds of snowy peaks above, below and in every direction,
some of their hoary heads lost in the clouds, were glistening in the
light of a clear September moon, and the stillness was only broken by a
wild stream tumbling down the precipices which I looked up to as I
crossed the bridge. It was indeed an impressive scene--cold, desolate,
awful. I walked so near the freezing cataract that the icicles touched
my face, and thinking that Dante, when he wrote his description of hell,
might have been inspired by this very scene, I wrapped my cloak closer
about me and went back to the inn.

The diligences were ready, and we commenced a descent which I cannot
even now think of without a shudder. To each of those heavily-laden
stages were attached two horses only, and we bounded down the
mountain-side like a huge loosened boulder. Imagine the sensation as
you looked out of the windows and saw yourself whirling over yawning
chasms and along the brinks of dizzy precipices, fully convinced that
the driver was drunk and the horses goaded to madness by Alpine demons!
I have been on the ocean in a storm sufficiently severe to make Jew and
Christian pray amicably together; I have been set on fire by a fluid
lamp, and have been dragged under the water by a drowning friend, but I
think I never had such an alarming sense of coming destruction as in
that diligence. I think of those sure-footed horses even now with
gratitude.

We arrived at Susa a long time before daylight. At first, I decided to
stay and see this town, which was founded by a Roman colony in the time
of Augustus. The arch built in his honor about eight years before Christ
seemed a thing worth going to see; but a remark from my companion with
the eye-glass made me determine to go on. He said he was going to "do"
the arch, and I knew I should not be equal to witnessing any more of his
ecstasies.

My first astonishment in Italy was that hardly any of the railroad
officials spoke