Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/274

290 but scarcely a more living narrator of history. His descriptions live. Persons, natural scenes, transactions—all are called forth plastically under his master hand.

The climate is almost as changeable here as in America. The day of my arrival at Geneva was cold but lovely; the next day, gray, windy, and disagreeable in the highest degree; and the day following that was a regular summer day, only too warm. In the evening, a little rain fell, then it became again clear, and the evening star, Venus, beamed forth in indescribable beauty. This is one of those periods which is said to recur every eighth year, when she receives and reflects the light of the sun, with an intensity which causes it to become to us, during some months, like a moon. Its most extreme splendor is said to occur in April and in June.

I make solitary excursions in and about the city, that I may make observations. This is a great enjoyment to me. Yesterday, the 22d of March, I took a glorious ramble along the banks of the Arve, to see its junction with the Rhone: Arve flows from the icy sea at Chamouni, and is here a tolerably broad, very cold stream, which winds, roaring with gray, turbid waters, now through sandy fields, now through fertile highlands, around which it forms for itself deep bays and curves. I followed the windings of the Arve for about an hour, from the handsome stone bridge at the little village of Carouge—formerly Savoyan, now a kind of suburb to Geneva—when, all at once, I saw standing up before me, in an oblique direction, the lofty ridge of a brown, precipitous