Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. BEENE. ?THE EIGI. Berne, September 17, midnight. WHENEVEE I reach any place, my dear Adele, tuy first thought is to write to you. Hardly am I shown to my room ere I have a table and an inkstand brought me, and I begin to chat with you, with all of you, my dearly-beloved children. All of you must take your share in my thoughts just as you have your share in my love. I arrived at Berne at night, just as I did at Lucerne, just as I did at Zurich. I do not object to this way of coming into a town. In a place which one first approaches at night, there is a mixture of glooms and irradiations, of lights that show you things and shadows that hide them from you: consequently things present themselves to you under a peculiarly exaggerated and chimerical aspect, which has its charm. There is a combination of the known and the unknown, giving the mind a chance to indulge in such dreams as it may fancy. Many objects that are merely prose by day take on in the darkness a certain poesy. By night the profiles of things expand; by day they shrink. It was eight o'clock in the evening; I had left Thun at five. The sun had been down for two hours and the moon, which is in its first quarter, had risen behind me from among the lofty, ragged crests of the Stockhorn. My four- wheeled cabriolet rolled swiftly along over an excellent road. I have the same cabriolet, which has merely changed drivers by some peculiar arrangement. My driver at present is picturesque enough; he is a tall Piedmoritese with black whiskers and a wide glazed hat; he is buttoned up in an immense box-coat or carrick, such as hack-drivers wear, made of fawn-coloured leather, lined with black sheepskin, and ornamented on the outside with patches of red, blue, and green leather sewed on the fawn- coloured back...