Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/319

Rh I wish I could, impart this rising up into God above the wants and shortcomings of our humanity, to some of my Swiss friends, who sink themselves too much into the consciousness of sin. This they must have, that they may all the more inwardly, all the more lovingly, comprehend the Saviour.

From Chaux de Fonds, I went, with my kind entertainers, to Le Saut du Doubs, saw its beautiful cascade, and its wonderful natural basins, in the bosom of the rocks, which appear as if hewn, by the hand of man, into circular Colosseums—a glorious trip, on the loveliest of days. I then proceeded to Locle, where the inhabitants work and live as they do at Chaux de Fonds, and thence to the most beautiful of valleys,—Val Travers; the inhabitants of which are wealthy, by the manufacture of machinery for watch-making, but are said to be quarrelsome and disagreeable.

In Val Travers, however, I became acquainted with an amiable mother and daughter, my kind hostesses, ultra-Calvinists, who maintained that we, one and all of us, were “vipers;” and also with the work of Jean Reynaud, Terre et Ciel, which I shall add to my small library at home.

From the highlands of the Jura, I proceeded down to Sommerhause, a beautiful champaign, on a terrace, by the Lake of Neufchâtel, of which a young lady was the proprietor and mistress. Women, in the Canton Neufchâtel, attain to legal majority at the age of nineteen. There are several single women, of various ages, settled on their own fine properties, around the lake. Friendship, the beauties of nature,