The Sun.
London, England, 1865-09-18 00:00:00

out of their depth, and their crested shadows relieve
with their dark fringes the vivid green of the sloping
pastures beneath. Wood is as hair to a landscape.
Looked at singly a hair is a wondrous texture, but
by no means a pleasing object, bur, let it fall in
clusters round the neck and shoulders, and itbecomes
one of the great elements to give loveliness or dig-
nity to the human face divine.

But I must not forget that the theme of my tra-
velling notes is the traveller, not the land he travels
through. Interlaken, we are told, is half German i
the 36 tribes that have been toiling from the days
of Otho the Great to become a nation have made
themselves at home here, and it is as much as one
can hope if one can crowd in here in some of
their pensions among them. The Junfraublick,
for instance, is almost entirely taken up by Ham-
burg, Dusseldorf, and Baden. The Germans
have managed to get up a Kursaal here, where
they have music and beer and pipes. This Kur-
saal is a huge chalet lurking back in the rear of the
row of hotels, close to the river, and almost crushed
by the perpendicular mountain behind. There is a
room for drinking goat's whey on the premises, and
there are molkenk6r, traubenkur, and all other sorts
of kurs in several" establishments about the place.
For your German has faith in cures, all and each,
and his learned doctor sets no limits to his inventive
powers, and rides out on a• new hobby yearly. I
hear even of a hunger-kur being now the rage—a
starvation system which, carried on with stubborn
German consistency, will undoubtedly rid a matt of
a.ll earthly complaints.

Notwithstanding this ascendancy of Germany and
Germanism, Interlaken cannot, at the present
moment, harbour less than 700 or 800 English
guests within its dwellings. Their number would
soon exceed the thousands if this long spell of per-
petual sunshine were to break, and the many cara-
vans which are now rambling along the passes of the
Wengern Alp, of the Great Scheideck, of the Ro-
gonu..ui aad thn arljoining vallPyg, worn to Lo ArivPri
in by stress of weather, as their wont is, and seek
the well-known comfort of this overland centre.

For the rest, the particular charm which makes
Interlaken the resort of Alpine tourists is sufficiently
obvious to all corners. It has all the character of
an oasis in the mountain wilderness. Here you
stand on perfect even ground—a strip of level ver-
dure between two lakes, shut in by huge rocky
masses, on the beauty of which you may gaze to your
heart's content as you saunter along the easiest of
garden walks, under the shade of the loftiest walnut
trees. It is the oasis in the desert, the secure haven
from which to contemplate the turmoil of Alpine
storms. On one side (the southern side, the side
towards which all your front windows are turned),
you have two great mountain masses coming down
obliquely upon each other from east and west, and
closing the view much as the screens and curtains
of a drawing-room, or the decorations of a stage.
Those two mountain sides are like the folding-
doors of a reliquary, or of a triptych, on an
altarpiece in some old medkeval minster. The wings
fly open, and within you see the Jungfrau, that
Venus de Medici of mountains, wooing the world in
purest snow and ice. There is nothing like the one
view at Interlaken in tie whole Alpine region—no-
thing, perhaps, unless we cross over to the other
side and see Mont Blanc descending in one slope
like a wall upon Cormayeur, or Monte Rose coming,
as it were bodily, within reach of man's hand amid
the rich pastures of Gressoney.