Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/271

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In Geneva—Countess de Gasparin—Merle d'Aubigné. The Arve and Rhone—Mont Salève—The Hero of the Scene—Visit to the Workshops of Watch-makers—Women's Work—A Female Worker—Churches and Ecclesiastical Affairs—Intellectual Life—Geneva, the Paradise of Unmarried Women—Calvin's “Institutions”—Jargonaut—“The Living Water”—Domestic Life—A New Flower—An Old Calvinist—Old and New Geneva. old author writes; “Geneva had become the rendezvous of reform, its Rome, its Jerusalem. And when the pilgrims coming through the pass of the Alps or the Jura Mountains beheld ‘the City of the Lord,’ they united in singing the hymn of praise and victory.

“It is she, the little city, the new Bethlehem, where God has been pleased to let his Son be born anew, the city which he has prepared as a refuge for righteous men!”

But of this I was not thinking, when, on the 15th of March, I hastened towards Geneva, across Lake Leman. The magnificence of the scene occupied both soul and mind. It was a glorious day, cold, but of inimitable brightness. Lausanne gave me the most friendly glance at parting, and I replied to it with all my heart as I saw its magnificent old cathedral, surrounded by masses of gray-brown houses and still leafless woods, vanish in the distance. I had been happy there.