their age, and could reach to their fathers'
hearts. Hearts, indeed, came into vogue in
place of hats, and coats, and frills, and
suchlike attributes of paternity. Nature, so long
tied and bound, managed to free some of her
limbs from the cords of the senseless custom
which had so long restrained her. When her
arms were loosed, it was only like herself that
she should embrace her child.

The British father has undergone a great
metamorphosis of late years. He has relaxed
his old severity of aspect, and become more
human. He plays Jove no longer; he has cast
aside his tinfoil thunderbolts, and come down
from his pasteboard Olympus. He stands
confessed a man—a man with the same heart and
the same sympathies as those which animate
the breasts of boys. It may be said that children
have compelled their autocratic fathers to
give them a constitution. When they know
how to use a knife and fork—which is their
qualification for the franchise—they are allowed
to sit at the same table with their parents.
They are permitted to have a voice in the house,
and to exercise their right respectfully to think
and have opinions of their own. Love and
sympathy and intelligent communion have taken
the place of a cold and senseless severity, and
children, who formerly were little better than
mechanical dolls, to be pushed up and down a
stick like monkeys, or squeezed for a bark, like
toy dogs, are freed from artificial restraints,
and their intelligence is allowed to expand with
the natural growth of their minds and bodies.

No human system is perfect; and in treating
of Boys in these pages, I ventured to express the
fear that children might be forced on too rapidly.
This is a danger to be guarded against; but it
is easy to guard against incidental dangers when
the fundamental system is based upon sound
and rational principles. And there is no doubt
that the relations which now subsist between
parents and children are more in accordance
with nature and reason then they have ever been
at any previous period of the world's wisdom.

FOREIGN CLIMBS.

IF you read to a lady a newspaper
paragraph recounting a death through crinoline,
whether by burning or by entanglement in a
carriage-wheel, she will ask in triumph, " And
do you never get killed foolishly? What are
your battues? What are your Melton
Mowbrays? And what, if you please, are your Alpine
scrambles? I have as much right to expose
myself to a roasting or a pounding, as you have
to risk your neck on a gun-flint a thousand feet
in height. And it brings me more permanent
enjoyment. At best, you have only a few fleeting
hours of excitement; you can't reside on the
point of a needle; whereas, I am daily in
everybody's way; I can daily swell myself to any
dimensions; I have the daily pleasure of
draggling my train through the mire, and of frowning
on every one who chances to tread on it."

It may be safely stated that many more deaths
from accident and imprudence occur amongst the
Alps, than ever reach the public eye or ear—
certainly those of the British public. To be
assured of this, you have only to travel in
Switzerland with your ears and eyes open. The
increased number we have recently heard of,
may be ascribed partly to increased publicity,
and partly to the increasing rashness of would-
be acrobats calling themselves amateur
mountaineers.

But a mountaineer may be assumed to be a
person who, dwelling amidst mountains, uses
them for the purposes of procuring sustenance
and shelter for himself, his family, and his cattle;
for the chase, and for travelling from one spot
in his native country to another. An ambitious
adventurer coming from afar, with money and
curious appliances, for the sake of scaling, with
no practical object or end except the gratification
of his personal vanity, peaks and pinnacles
never scaled before, is no more a mountaineer
than Blondin, wheeling a child in a barrow
along his tight-rope, is a mountaineer. And he
has not Blondin's excuse for his temerity—a
living to get—nor, now, his merit, originality.
On the contrary, he is following a comparatively
beaten track known to be beset with dangers;
while his example is inducing other weak
simpletons to come after him and do the same.

Does our snarling philosophy, then, mean to
prohibit the pleasures of Alpine excursioning?
Certainly not; only, like other pleasures, let
them be enjoyed in moderation and with common
sense. The fact is—and it cannot be too
strongly insisted on—that there really exist
three distinct Switzerlands, suspended one over
the other at different altitudes. The first—the
Switzerland of ladies, children, elderly gentlemen,
and ordinary folk in general, includes all the
valleys and lakes traversed by railways, highway
roads, and steamers, comprising the carriageable
passes, such as Mont Cenis, the Simplon, the St.
Gothard, and others. These, with the walks and
rides branching off from them, afford an immense
total of enchanting scenery, which will occupy
several years of delightful travel.

The second region, sometimes dovetailing
with the first, sometimes soaring above it, takes
in the localities which cannot be reached in
carriages, but to which prudent lads and lassies
may roam on foot or on horseback, with proper
precautions. Its limits are necessarily variable
and indefinite, depending upon season, weather,
nerve, obedience to guides, and the capability
of those individuals; of whom it is only justice
to say that accidents rarely occur through their
fault. But as there are plants which gardeners
call " half hardy," and which, in fact, are not
hardy at all, so there are Swiss excursions
commonly regarded as tolerably safe, or slightly
dangerous, which in truth are not a bit safe, but
are perfectly dangerous. All that can be said
is, that you may accomplish them with a whole
skin, which may also be stated of the ascent of
Mount Cervin. Several of the minor less
frequented peaks are in the same predicament; as