The women are extremely domestic, delighting in their children; and all the Swiss are remarkable for their passionate love of home. In every village there is a school, established by the Government for the instruction of poor children. The Swiss are the most graceful of all peasants, and wear very smart costumes. The men wear large hats, and their dress is generally a brown cloth jacket without sleeves, and puffed breeches of ticking. The women have short blue petticoats, a cherry-coloured boddice, full white sleeves fastened above the elbow, and a muslin kerchief thrown round their necks; while their hair is plaited, and twisted about their heads. They also wear pretty flat straw hats, ornamented with bows of ribbon.
The scenery of Switzerland is of the most charming and romantic description; there are towering mountains, craggy rocks, steep precipices, with foaming torrents dashing down their sides, and dizzy heights, which I should be sorry any of my little friends were looking down. But these are delightfully intermixed with beautiful valleys, adorned with groves of fir, beech, and chestnut trees; clear lakes, rapid rivers, cataracts, and bridges of one arch reaching an immense distance from rock to rock. Portions of the mountains are covered with villages and scattered cottages; and the inside of the dwellings are so neat and look so comfortable, that you could almost wish to live in one of them, if you were not told that there is a perpetual danger of their being buried under one of the enormous masses of snow that frequently roll from the tops of the mountains, and destroy everything in their way. These masses are called Avalanches.
Between the summits of the highest of the mountains are valleys of ice, frozen into many fantastic shapes, formed by one crust of ice growing hard over another; but what is more extraordinary, is that the borders of these glaciers, as they are called, are fertile: strawberries, wild cherries, nuts, barberries, and mulberries, grow there; and goats browse on the most inaccessible parts of the rocks, and bound with the most surprising agility from one cliff to another.
Several contributions have been sent by the Prussians and Austrians; woollens, minerals, linens, china, and other things.