This year we have enjoyed the unusual privilege of seeing bright green fields in mid-January at a height of three thousand five hundred feet above the sea, and people who came to meet the snow and ice have been picking primroses instead⁠—so several newspapers report⁠—upon the slopes about the Lake of Geneva. The winter has got lost somewhere, and the familiar phrase of the hotelier, “We never knew such weather before at this time of year,” has been really justified for once. All over Switzerland it has been the same, east and west, north and south⁠—warm winds from the Atlantic, rain, fog, thaw, and only just enough frost at the resorts that lie above five thousand feet to provide a little inferior skating. The disappointment of many hundreds has been keen, and the loss to hotels and purveyors of winter-sport articles unquestionably very large. For the great holiday rush is over now, and hundreds never put on their ski at all. The sleighs have hardly dared to show their runners; the peasants are doing all their carting still on wheels. They are content, however. “Quel bel hiver!” they say, thus adding insult to injury. For the Basses Alpes, usually lying beneath ten feet of snow at this time, are green and full of hints of spring flowers⁠—a condition unknown in January for very many years. The hares are running over the upper pastures, fat and well fed. They may be puzzled, but they like it as much as the peasants do. And all the summits of the Jura Mountains, usually crested and heavily “corniced” with creamy white, lie at this moment bare aud green, as one knows them in the beginning of April. Yesterday I picked a large blue gentian at a height of four thousand five hundred feet above the sea. There are patches of snow, and drifts and occasional little fields of it, but all growing daily smaller. The very torrents are the torrents one knows, swollen and turbid, after the first spring thaws. With the exception of a fairly heavy fall just before Christmas everything that has since fallen from the sky⁠—below four thousand feet⁠—has been rain, or rainy sleet with a few flakes of snow mixed here and there in midair, enough to permit hope though hope as yet unfulfilled. Although a sprinkling of visions come out at the end of November and early in December expecting to find the winter already in full sway, the majority know that the real snow hardly comes before the New Year. Christmas Week usually sees it, and by the time the great tourist army with two weeks at their disposal has arrived, there has been time for it to “settle,” freeze into powdery crystals and get generally into good condition. Each fresh fall then adds to its perfection. But this year all these secondary falls have been rain or sleet. There was an early “chute” in November, very heavy, though quickly disappearing; and since then there have been, in the Jura at least, a favourite skiing ground, as many as nine other falls, each one melting quicker than its predecessor. For the prevailing winds have been west and southwest, and the frost has been barely enough to keep the few available northern slopes (where the sun cannot reach them during the day) in dry condition, even for the slowest skiing. The consequence is that the second instalment of visitors, who come for February, have been frightened away. The Jura hotels, usually crowded at this time, are fast emptying, and the carriages meet empty trains. The season, already half over, has been a very disappointing one⁠—the worst for many years. Moreover, coming on the heels of two other indifferent ones, it has done Switzerland much harm. Her reputation is in danger. On every side one hears men saying, “Next year I shan’t risk it again. I shall go to Norway.” In Norway there is good skiing up to the close of April, and in some places even into May. The journey is longer, the sea portion is a nuisance to most, but the prices en pension compare favourably with Swiss hotel prices, and are even less, and a skier gets his money’s worth, at any rate. Now, at this very moment, writing in these last days of January at a height not far from four thousand feet, the sun blazes in a cloudless sky upon green fields and pine woods untouched by white, birds are singing, there are summery fleecy clouds just visible upon the distant Alps, and a mild southwest wind brings thoughts and feelings that belong to April. Spring is in the air. It seems absurd to talk of ski at all. And every morning the hotelier wrings his hands and taps the weatherglass and looks morbidly at the soppy rink. “It will come, yes, it will come,” he says, though with less conviction daily; “it will come in February. The winter is later than usual, that’s all. We always get it in the end!” Probably, too, he is right.