Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/834

824 to be, and more than will be reasonable of you to expect from me also, unless you can bring yourself to receive it with greater appearance of acknowledgment than you yet do; especially after saying that you went into the country only to serve Mr. H[ewer], to whom your whole family owes its having a bit of bread to eat at this time and for several years backward, and whose whole ayme for prevailing with me to send you down to my house was to preserve you as much as he could from being undone by the chargeableness of your living here, and particularly under so great a house rent. Which that you maybe the better convinced of, if you do indeed find as little benefit in the charge of living by being where you are, but if all things are as dear, and many dearer than they are at London, you shall be at liberty to return to town and have the same allowance of 20s. a week for your income, here or where else you please, till your husband be here to provide otherwise for you. And this I am quite willing to offer you because I will by no means have you stay an hour longer where you are than you not only take as a kindness from me, but do really find and by your accounts shall convince me that you can live cheaper there than here. Therefore I do with all kindness desire you seriously to think of it as being the utmost you have to trust to, and rather more than less, unless it shall please God to give both my brother and you more thoughtfulness of your and your family's condition than, to my great trouble, I fear you have ever hitherto had.Adieu.


 * If the workmen come again pray direct them to Mr. Loke, to whom I will write about them this or the next post, in order to his looking over their work and paying them; for I do not love to have any scores of my own, and do depend upon your not letting me hear again of any of yours.

This letter, the most characteristic of those exhibited, shows the systematic manner in which Pepys regulated the affairs of daily life. It may be hoped that some day the account-books showing how a genteel couple lived in London two centuries ago on a pound a week, will yet turn up.

 

  — Not far from Monte Rosa, and separated from it by the broad sweep of a glacier, rises the Lyskamm, not much lower than the great mountain itself; next come twin heights, Castor and Pollux, and then what we must confess is our favourite of this range, the Breithorn. It has not quite the height of those we have mentioned, but it has a grandeur of rocky outline which others want, and which elevates it in the mind's eye far above actual measurement. Its vast precipices sweep in grand semicircular terraces across its summit and round its sides, and clasp between them mountains and valleys of snow which mimic the contortions and follow the curves of the strong arms which hold them in their close embrace. Next the eye rests upon a broad sweep of snow which rises gracefully to a rounded ridge and disappears, This is the Pass of St. Théodule; but soon the eye is drawn away from this high Alpine way to the Matterhorn, which rises a tower of snow-clad rock to a height five hundred feet less than Monte Rosa. But standing thus alone, and rising in one comiiaratively narrow mass with sides too steep to be smothered in snow, it seems higher and more commanding than all the rest. So Zermatt comes to be connected in the mind of the tourist with the Matterhorn rather than with Monte Rosa, which latter, indeed, does not show so well from this as from the Italian side. It is long before the eyes can turn away from this the chief range of the Monte Rosa group, but when they do another and only less grand scene presents itself. There stand the two enormous buttresses which run at right angles from the great range, and indeed shut in the valley by which we have reached Zermatt. Now we see what was but partially revealed during the two days we travelled from Visp hither. To the right of our then path rises, among others, that Weisshorn we caught a glimpse of at Randa, while to its left and separating it from the Sass Valley, which joins it at Stalden, rises that glorious cluster of mountains, the Mischabelhörn. And away between these two ranges, beyond our valley and across that greater one of the Rhone we have as yet but partially explored, rises a confused multitude of Alps too far off to be distinguislied and localized, but yet near enough to show what the other side of the Rhone valley has in store for us in the Bernese Alps. One, however, stands out so grandly among that distant range as to claim especial notice, and takes its place, as it were, with this its far-off brethren, and so the Nesthorn comes to rank among the sights of the Corner Grat. The Month.