Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland

t that they supplied ice for Lyons. Their existence had been apparently reported to him by M. Alphonse Favre, but he had obtained no account of a visit to

e. On a fresher day, no doubt the great richness of the orchards and corn-fields would have been very striking; but on this particular morning the fields were already trembling with heat, and the trees and the fruit covered with dust; and there was nothing in the grouping of

ell, he ought in reason to be satisfied with less room for himself; but instead of speaking, he brought out a tobacconist's parcel and began to open it. Tobacco-smoke is all very well under suitable circumstances, but it is possible to be too hot and dusty and bilious to be able to stand it, and I watched his proceedings with more of annoyance than of resignation. The parcel turned out, however, to be delightful snuff, tastefully perfumed and very refreshing; and the politeness with which the owner gave a pinch to the foreign

. All the night through, whips are cracking, bells jingling, and men are shouting hoarsely or blowing hoarser horns. Moreover, the H?tel d'Angleterre had apparently needed a fresh coat of paint and universal papering for many years, and the latter need had at this crisis been so far grappled with that the old paper had been torn down from the walls and now lay

suggests an evening's course on the lake, or a morning's drive to some good view, and makes herself most winning and agreeable; who takes the words, moreover, out of the mouth of a man meditating an ordinary dinner, and assures him that she knows exactly what he wants, and he shall be well satisfied, with a sisterly air that makes the idea of francs and sous not sordid

voice, and pointed out how unlikely it was that Lyons should be supplied with ice from Annecy; nevertheless, I continued to ask my way in spite of protestation, till at length a lame man passed by, who said monsieur was quite right--he himself knew two glacières on the Mont Parmelan very well. He had never seen either

e to the glacières; on which he assured me that he knew every inch of the mountain, and there was not such a thing as a glacière in the whole district. At this moment, a gentlemanlike man was brought up by the waiter, and introduced to me as a monsieur who knew a monsieur who knew the proprietor of one of the glacières, and would he happy to conduct me to this second monsieur: so, without any very ceremonious farewell to the owner of the proffered voiture, we marched off together down the street, and eventually turned into a café, whose master was the monsieur for whom we were in search. Know the glacière?--yes, indeed! he had ice from it one year every morning. His wife and he had made a course to the campagne of M. the Maire of Aviernoz, and he--the cafétier--had descended for miles, as it were, down and down, till he came to an underground world of ice, wonderful, totally wonderful: there he perceived so immense a cold, that

olitely explained, they had built S. Francis another church, and utilised the old one. The town itself seemed to be of the squalid style of antiquity--old, no doubt, but very dirty. It is pervaded by streams, which crop up among the houses, and flow through dark alleys and vaulted passages, rarely coming into daylight, and suggesting all manner of dark crimes. The red-legged French kettledrums are, if pos

ated with him, but he assured me it did not matter; and when I reminded him that the diligence was to leave at half-past four, he observed philosophically that it was quite true, and I had better make haste, for the poste was very punctual. At the door of the bureau a loaded diligence stood, marked Annecy--Aix, and I asked had the B

fortified style of agricultural building which seems to prevail in that district. After an amount of experience in out-of-the-way places which makes me very cautious in saying that one in particular is dirtier than a dozen others, I venture to say that the auberge of Villaz is the most squalid I have come across; and I would not feed there again, except in very robust health, even for a new glacière. Still, it was absolutely necessary to eat something, and the landlady promised coffee and bread. She showed me first into the kitchen; but as it was also the place where the domestics slept, with many quadrupeds, I declined to sit there. Upon this she led me to the salon, where the window resisted all our efforts for so

an amazing in many ways. When I confessed that I had only made the acquaintance of the amazing man the night before, and therefore did not feel competent to give any reliable account of the state of his health, beyond the fact that he seemed to be in excellent spirits, the maire looked upon me evidently with great respect, as having won so far upon a great character like Dugravel in so short a time, and determined to accompany me himself. Meantime, we must drink some kirsch. The maire was a young man, spare and vehement. He talked with a headlong impetuosity which caused him to be always hot, and his hair limp and errant; and at the end of each sentence there were so many laggard halves of words to come out together, with so little breath to bring them out, that he eventuated in a stuttering scream. His cloth

osset, the schoolmaster, stated that he had heard us, as he sat in his room, talking of the proposed visit to the glacière, and he should much wish to accompany us. We both expressed the warmest satisfaction; but the maire suggested--how about the boys? That, M. Rosset said, was simple enough. The world would go to the school at nine o'clock, and, finding no schoolmaster, would go home again, or otherwise employ itself; and he could have school on the weekly holiday, to make up for the lost day. This weekly holid

e maire) explained to me that the inspector of schools was to visit Aviernoz that day. The schoolmaster recovered before long, and said he should inform the inspector that a famous savant had come from England, and required that the maire a

a year, or, for shorter periods than a year, at the rate of 75 centimes a month; between seven and thirteen, 6 francs a year, or 1 franc a month; from thirteen to eighteen, 8 francs a year, or 1 f. 50 c. a month. There is the same difficulty in France, of course, as with us, in keeping children at school after they are old enough to earn a few centimes by cattle-keeping; and the Ministry of Edu

o years ago he had discovered another in the neighbourhood, which he had not since visited. He was assisted in his capacity of maire by twelve councillors--in a larger commune it would have been fifteen--and the council met four times in the year. If it was desirable that they should meet on any other occasion, he must write to the prefect of the arrondissement for permission, specifying the business which they wished to conduct, and to this specified business they must confine themselves entirely. Then he wished to know, had we maires such as he in England? Hereupon I drew a fancy picture of the Lord Mayor of London, receiving the Queen and the Royal Family in general in a friendly way, and giving them a dinner,--which, he observed, must cost a good deal, a great deal. However, he looked round upon his fields and houses and mountains, and seemed

ll communes had about ￡40 a year, but I must have more than that, or I could not afford to travel so far from home. Had I already said the mass that morning? Had I my robes in the sac I had left at the Mairie? Was the red book they had seen in my han

weight is sufficient to send it down; and here the porter places himself in front, with his back leaning against the sacks of charcoal and the turned-up runners, and the whole mass descends headlong, the man's legs going at a wild pace, and now one foot, now the other, steering a judicious course at the turns of the zigzags. The charcoal is made by Italians, who live on polenta and che

, milk only, in some shape or other. The forms under which milk can be taught to appear are manifold. A young Swiss student, who in the madness of his passion for beetle-hunting had spent fifteen days

des.

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. Du lait

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mi-gras.

igre. Du lait

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s; but the French writers who treat learnedly of cheese-making in the Annales de Chimie adopt the form sérets; and in the Annales Scientifiques de l'Auvergne I find both seret and serai, from the Latin serum.There was also bread, which arrived when we were sitting down to our meal: it had been baked in a huge ring, for convenience of carriage, and was brought up from the low-lands on a stick ac

an unstable equilibrium by resting their own legs on the top of the walls. Here they sat, smoking and being smoked, till they were dry and warm. Of course, in case of a slip or an inadvertent movement, they would have gone sprawling into the fire. A well-known Swiss botanist, who has seen many strange sleeping-places in the course of sixty years of flower-hunting in the mountains of Vaud and Valais, has told me that on one occasion he had reached with great difficulty the only chalet in the neighbourhood of his day's researches, at a late hour of the night, the whole mountain being soaked with ra

arger than that of any other of the pit-glacières I have seen. A few yards off there is a smaller shaft in the rock, which we afterwards found to communicate with the glacière. The NW. side of the larger pit, being the side at the bottom of which is the arch of entrance, is vertical, and we spent the time necessary for growing cool in measuring the height of thi

THE GLACIèRE OF GR

a compote of dark-coloured duckweed--or, to use a more familiar simile, like a mass of overboiled and ill-strained spinach. To the grief of one of us, there was ice under this, of most persuasive slipperiness. The maire said that he had never seen these signs of thaw in his visits in previous years; and as we went farther and farther into the cave, he was more and more surprised at each step to find such a large quantity of running water, and so much less ice than he had expected. The shape of the glacière is a rough circle, 60 feet in diameter; and the floor, which is solid ice, slopes gradually down to the farther end. The immediate entra

and the rock-wall at the farther edge falls away into a sort of open fissure, down which magnificent cascades of ice stream emulously, clothing that side of the pit, which would otherwise be solid rock. We cut a few steps about the upper edge of this moulin, to make all safe, and proceeded to let down a lighted candle, which descended safely for 36 feet, showing nothing but ice on all sides; it then came in contact with one

no signs of atmospheric disturbance, and revealing the fact that the opposite side of the pit, viz. the rock, which alone was visible from our position, became more and more thickly covered with ice, of exquisite clearness, and varied and most graceful forms. As foot after foot, and yard after yard, ran out, and our heads craned farther and farther over the edge of the pit to follow the descending light, (we lay flat on the ice, for more safety,) the cries of the schoolmaster became mere howls, and the maire lapsed into oaths heavy

for 8 feet; and then it finally rested on a shelf of ice, showing us the shadowy beginnings of what should be a most glorious ice-cave. The little light which the candle gave was made the most of by the reflecting material which surrounded it; and we were able to see that the archway in the rock was r

How far the solid wall receded at the bottom I was unable to determine, for the light of one candle was of very little use at so great a distance, and in darkness so profound. I persuaded the maire to make an effort to reach a point from which he could see the insecurity of the ice which had seemed to form so solid a floor; and he was so much impressed by what he saw, that he fled with precipitation from the cave, and we eventually found him asleep under a bush on the rocks above. In reaching the farther side of the pit, we crossed unwittingly an ice-bridge formed by a transverse pit or tunnel in

ites here presented the peculiar prismatic structure so often noticed; but on the more exposed side of the column they were tipped with limpid ice, free from all apparent external or internal lines. This reminded me of what we had observed in the Glacière of La Genollière, namely, that the surface-lines tended to disappear under thaw; so I cut a piece o

-floor is considerable, and the workmen increased the slope by cutting away the ice in the neighbourhood of the edge of the moulin: they had also, as we could see quite plainly, excavated the clearer parts of the ice between the entrance to the cave and the moulin, so that a sort of trough ran down from near the foot of the snow to the pit at the lower end of the glacière. When we were there, the water rushed down this trough, and was lost in the pit; and very probably the same may have been the case in the earlier parts of the year, when, according to the view I have already expre

ce goes, it fills the cavern to its farthest corners. The depth of this ice at one side is 60 feet, and how much more it may be in the middle it is impossible to say. As we have seen, there is a second ice-cave opening out of the principal one, at a depth of 190 feet below the surface; and with respect to this second

med to be comparatively warm, judging from what I had experienced in other glacières. The only current of air we could detect was exceedingly slight, and came from the deeper

he slope where the snow lay about 2 inches thick on solid ice, and the result was an unscholastic descent in inverted order of precedence. He got on better over the rolling stones after the snow was accomplished, but the clumsy style of his climbing dislodged an unpleasant amount and weight of missiles; and though he was amia

veraged 4,000 quintaux métriques a week, for the three months of July, August, and September; but the last winter had been so severe, that the lake had provided ice for the artificial glacières of Annecy, and no one had as yet applied to him th