eye,' from which the river takes its rise. A patch of bright green, mottling the brown heathy slope, shows where the water comes to the surface, a treacherous covering of verdure often concealing a deep pool beneath. From its source the rivulet trickles along the grass and heath, which it soon cuts through, reaching the black, peaty layer below, and running in it for a short way as in a gutter. Excavating its channel in the peat, it comes down to the soil, often a stony earth bleached white by the peat. Deepening and widening the channel as it gathers force with the increasing slope, the water digs the coating of drift or loose decomposed rock that covers the hillside. In favourable localities a narrow precipitous gully, twenty or thirty feet deep, may thus be scooped out in the course of a few years."
"Deepening and widening as it gathers force."
If, however, we trace one of the Swiss rivers to its source, we shall often find that it begins in a snowfield, or neve, nestled in a shoulder of some great mountain.
Below the neve lies a glacier—on, in, and under which the water runs in a thousand little streams, eventually emerging at the end, in some cases forming a beautiful blue cavern, though in others the end of the glacier is encumbered and concealed by earth and stones. severe.
The uppermost Alpine valleys are perhaps generally, though by no means always, a little desolate and severe. The sides are clothed with pasture, which is flowery indeed, though of course the flowers are not visible at a distance, interspersed with live rock and fallen masses, while along the bottom rushes a white torrent. The snowy mountains are generally more or less hidden by the shoulders of the hills.
The valleys further down widen, and become more varied and picturesque. The snowy peaks and slopes are more often visible; the "alps," or pastures to which the cows are taken in summer, are greener, and dotted with the huts or châlets of the cowherds; while the tinkling of the cowbells comes to one from time to time, softened by distance, and suggestive of mountain rambles. Below the alps there is generally a steeper part clothed with firs, or with larches and pines, some of which seem as if they were scaling the mountains in regiments, preceded by a number of skirmishers. Below the fir woods again are beeches, chestnuts, and other deciduous trees, while the central cultivated portion of the valley is partly arable, partly pasture; the latter differing from our meadows in containing a large proportion of flowers.
Apart from the action of running water,
