Four hours’ walk above Brieg in a blazing sun on one of the hottest days known, ended in a storm of rain which wet me through; it delayed me in a forest where I had the luck to see a fine fox at close quarters; we watched each other quietly for some minutes. I found my wife and friends at Rieder Furka and walked with them up and down a baby mountain called the Riederhorn; then later, with an active fellow made the ascent and back to the hotel in twenty-two minutes, just to dry my clothes.
The hotel is well placed above the Great Aletsch Glacier, upon which delightful expeditions are made, especially to the Märjelen See, a wonderful ice-bound lake with icebergs in it, which has before now threatened Brieg with a flood from the sudden bursting of its waters upon the valley far below.
Home again by Geneva, I visited the Cantonal Hospital there, which is well built and planned; but in the summer the building is empty and clean, the patients being in open-air barracks, timber-built with canvas sides. Would that our English climate would allow of the like. On the other side of the city, at the Rothschild’s Eye Hospital, there seemed every comfort, but few patients to be treated.
The sight of England again always cheers us, with homely peaceful scenes; well may we say in travelling through the Kentish hop fields:
“Let Frenchmen boast their straggling vine,
Which gives them draughts of meagre wine,
It cannot match this plant of mine
When autumn skies are blue.”