Read Ebook: A walk in the Grisons by Zincke F Barham Foster Barham

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Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends; Where rolled the ocean thereon was his home; Where a blue sky, and glowing clime extends, He had the passion and the power to roam; The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam Were unto him companionship.--BYRON.

It is a good practical rule to be prepared for the worst, without at all taking it for granted that it will come to that, for things need seldom turn out as bad as they may be made to look, or as they may be forced into becoming. So I began by assuming that all was just as it should be, and would so continue. Our road was at first up hill, and the sun was full on our side of the valley. This, and the moisture with which the air was laden, for the wet on the surface of the ground, and on every dripping object, was being rapidly evaporated, made it unusually warm walking. I foresaw the good effect this might have, for I anticipated that it would bring my circumnavigator to a consciousness of his unfitness for his work, and so probably would lead him to correct the estimate he had lately been setting forth of the value of his prospective services. What I had anticipated was not long in coming. He soon had to take off his broadcloth coat. Within an hour he called a halt. Before the second hour was out his boots had become so pinching and galling that he had begun to limp. He never again was so beaten as on this day; indeed, he continued to improve during the whole of the time he remained with me, though to the last he was far from having acquired the power of doing well an ordinary day's work; and this often obliged me, as it did to-day, to end the day's march short of the point to which I should have been glad to have extended it; but from this time nothing more was heard of his having underrated the value of his services.

Another particular of interest the Schanfiggthal supplies is an instance of what geologists call earth-pillars. Some of these I saw by the wayside in the last ravine before entering Castiel, or St. Peter's, I forget which: the locality, however, may be so described as to be readily identified. They are to be seen from the new road about 200 yards beyond the chief ravine it crosses in its whole course. It had just made a bend to the left to cross this ravine, and then had faced to the south to recover the line of its general eastward direction. Just before it resumes this direction, that is to say just as it is about to leave the left side of the ravine, there are visible, some way below you, on the opposite side of the ravine, several of these earth pillars. Some appeared thirty feet, or more, in height. Some had still on their tops the boulders which had led to their formation. Of course they are situated so high above the torrent of the ravine as to be quite out of its reach, even at the times of its greatest rise; for had it ever touched them it must have undermined and washed them away. Obviously their formation is due exclusively to the action of rain. It must commence the work on the side of a ravine, above high torrent mark, by washing away the soil around a boulder. A beginning having thus been made, the storms of centuries continue the work; the water of every rainfall runs off the boulder, and cuts down a little deeper into the soil beneath, carrying down into the torrent below what has been cut away. This action does not cut down the soil beneath the boulder-cap quite perpendicularly, so that as the height of the pillar increases, or rather as the soil is more cut into, the base of the pillar becomes somewhat enlarged. Its form, therefore, is that of an exceedingly steep-sided cone. The interest of these earth pillars is not confined to the fact that they are a result of so long a continuance of rain action, for as we look at them we cannot but be reminded of some other conditions that were requisite for their formation, such as suitableness of situation, and soil of the requisite texture. Other instances of the formation are to be found in Switzerland elsewhere, and there may be some others even in this valley; I believe, however, that nowhere in Europe is it exhibited on so large a scale, and with such lofty and perfectly formed specimens as in the Tyrol, in the neighbourhood of Botzen.

'Of course you have milk.'

'No.'

'Can you get some?'

'Perhaps.' For she knew of a neighbour who might have a cow at home in the village. All the rest were on the alpe.

In about half an hour the meagre cheese, dried beef, and milk were set before us, for I saw that in such a house it would be better that I should invite the circumnavigator to take his meals with me: it would be soothing to his Australian sense of the dignity of man, and would save trouble to the good people. I afterwards came to a similar conclusion with respect to the second bed in my bedroom, for I could not suppose that there was any other room in the house available for guests to sleep in.

As to the meagre cheese, and dried beef, during the following three weeks, as must be the case with every pedestrian through the by ways of the Grisons, I had many opportunities of weighing their merits and demerits, undisturbed by any simultaneous consideration of other comestibles. The meagre cheese is made of skimmed milk in places where a market can be found for butter. Peist sells its butter at Coire; and so the good people of the place, and their few visitors, have to content themselves with cheese from which the butter has been extracted. It is not positively bad; but this negation of badness is its only merit. The dried beef is a production of the Grisons, for which they are indebted to their climate. At the altitude of their valleys, the air is so dry that for nine months out of the twelve meat has no tendency to decomposition. Availing themselves of this favourable condition they kill in the autumn the beef and pork they will require in the ensuing year. It is slightly salted and hung up to dry. Nothing more is done to it, except eating it. In three or four months time it is not only dried, but also cooked, that is to say the air has given it all the cooking it will ever receive. It has become as dry and hard as a board, and internally of the colour of an old mahogany table. Externally there is nothing to suggest the idea of meat; it is covered with cobwebs, dust and mould, and is undistinguishable from fragments of the mummies of the sacred bulls taken from the catacombs of the Serapeum at Memphis. When your host brings from his cellar the leg of the mummy of a Grison cow, shrunk to the dimensions of the human limb, and tells you that it is to be your dinner, you are disposed to advise him to take it to the trustees of the British Museum. He is, however, about to prepare some for your repast, and you watch the process with curiosity. It is a very simple one: the material is cut across the grain with a very sharp knife in shavings no thicker than writing-paper. Were it cut the length of the fibre it would be as unmanageable in the mouth as a piece of whipcord, or a fiddle-string. Curiosity again, somewhat stimulated by necessity, for the only alternative is the meagre cheese, at last impels you, with many misgivings, and after much deliberation, to carry one of the shavings to your mouth. After a week or two's experience you will begin to think that it is not badly flavoured, nor unusually repugnant to the process of digestion.

It was not, however, my first essay in dining on mummy beef which brought me to this negative estimate of its qualities. My dinner, therefore, to-day was but a frugal one. While its remains were being removed, our host, to whom in some way or other our arrival had been communicated, entered the room, and seating himself on a chair which he had placed in the middle of it, lighted his pipe, as a preliminary to conversation. This presented an opportunity for inquiring whether the resources of the village could be made to supply a supper that might in some degree compensate for the shortcomings of the dinner. To every question a decided negative was returned. There was, however, one suggestion the good man could make. A neighbour had a hen; she might not be unwilling to part with the creature for a proper consideration; and there would be time to make it into something for supper. I was horrified. I looked on the author of the suggestion, seated in the middle of the room, in his blouse and with his pipe in his mouth, as an ogre, and who, besides being an ogre himself, was offensively taking me for a brother ogre. That this unprepared hen, the pet of the children, and the familiar acquaintance of all the village, should have its days, and its career, too, of usefulness, cut short; that it should be put into the pot before the life was well out of it, merely to make a very doubtful addition to my supper! The blood of the poor bird would be upon me. The first mouthful would choke me; and that would be only what I had deserved. I peremptorily forbad the repetition of so shocking a proposal.

DAVOSTHAL--ALVENEU--THE SCHYN--THUSIS--HOHEN RH?TIEN.

How poor are they that have not patience!--SHAKESPEARE.

Our horse was willing, and the driver not unwilling, and so we reached the Bad before dark. I found here about fifty people just seated down to supper. I was told that they were chiefly Swiss, many of them from the eastern cantons. Family parties, in which the middle-aged element largely entered, were in preponderance. It was evident that they had much to say to each other; and saying this probably did them as much good as drinking the waters.

The ravine of the Schyn nowhere admits of any kind of cultivation, not even of an occasional patch of grass. Pines are its only produce. Among these I saw towards its western extremity many fine specimens of the silver fir, which I had nowhere previously noticed. I do not see why the Douglas pine, one of the most rapid in growth, and valuable as timber, of all the conifers, should not be grown largely in Switzerland. Some of its moist and sheltered valleys would seem to be the very stations that might in every respect be exactly suited for it. It has been proved that it will grow rapidly in such places. In this, as in many other ravines, a track for removing the trees that have been felled below the road, is out of the question. If, therefore, they are to be used for fuel, they are cut into pieces, six feet in length, and pitched into the torrent, which transports them rapidly to their destination. Fuel that has been torrent-borne in this way may readily be distinguished, as it stands piled against the walls of the houses, by the manner in which the ends of the pieces have been bruised and frayed. If, however, what has been felled is to be used as timber for building, the length required would make it impossible to float it down such narrow, rocky, and tortuous streams. In this case winter must be waited for, and when it has frozen the torrent, and buried it beneath the snow, the hardy and industrious peasants avail themselves of the temporary pathway nature has provided, and haul their timber along it. But these winter pathways are not free from danger, for it sometimes happens that a rock, detached by the frost from an overhanging summit, falls on those who are at work below.

Being then obliged to remain at Thusis for the rest of the day, I went in the afternoon to see the old castle of Hohen Rh?tien. The ruins of one of these mediaeval strongholds cannot, generally, be regarded with much interest, because gratitude is no ingredient in the feelings which the sight of it awakens. The stage of history to which they belong was rather a painful interruption, than a satisfactory continuance, of the progress of human affairs. Its units, represented by these castles, were small fragments of rude force; and these were but ill-compacted into rude wholes, that hardly deserved the name of states. The strong owners of these castles were prompted by a consciousness of their strength to lives of violence and oppression, and the weak were obliged to attach themselves to the strong, only to be oppressed. The physical ruled the moral and intellectual without disguise and without mitigation, except so far as it was counteracted by what soon became the moral and intellectual tyranny of the Church. Of the evils of this system we even suppose that we have not yet reached the end, but that we are still in some degree suffering from them. For reasons of this kind we are indisposed to see in it, what history tells us we ought, the first step in the new order of things to which we belong, and which we may hope has grander possibilities for us than the preceding order of things in the old world had for those of its day; or, indeed, to see in it anything but an assertion of force and injustice, which for a long period altogether forbad, and the consequences of which may be still somewhat hindering, the advance of society in the direction of fair and reasonable institutions. It is with very different feelings that we contemplate the monuments of Greece and Rome, and even of old Egypt; for they do not, as these do, remind us of mere individual brute force. They were works of organized societies, whose wants were of a more human and cultured kind, and whose mistakes and misdeeds, as their consequences are now no longer felt, are almost lost to memory. At all events we owe them much. The very ruins of their buildings remind us of one part of the debt. But we cannot, or will not, feel in this way towards the owners of these old castles. In passing, therefore, the remains of one of them many of us have no wish to inspect it. It is not sacred ground to us. What pleases us most in the matter is the fact, visible in passing it, that it is in ruins.

For such reasons as these, while a little before midday I had looked up at the ruins of the old castle of Hohen Rh?tien, I had not thought them worth the hour or so that would have been required for going up to see them; but now in the afternoon, having nothing else to do, I inspected them with some attention. To get to them I had to recross the two bridges. I then, about 200 yards beyond that over the Hinter Rhein, crossed a small mill-race running parallel to the road, and went straight up a steep timber-slide, which is visible from the road. At the head of this you come on the regular horse-track, from Sils to the castle. Three or four hundred yards of this bring you to a steep turfy slope, where you may desert the horse path which winds round the summit to the top, and in five minutes you will be on the top among the ruins. They consist of several detached buildings. The first is a square tower with thick walls. It has no door, or constructed entrance, in the walls that now remain, the only access to the interior being by a hole in one of the angles. We may, therefore, suppose that this was an advanced outwork, that was entered either by a subterranean gallery which connected it with the castle some hundred yards off, or by a ladder which was applied to some aperture in an upper story which has now disappeared from the walls. It may also have been useful as a storehouse for provisions of some kind or other. Next to this is a structure, which evidently was a small church. It is in good preservation. The tower still stands. Alongside of the tower is a chamber with a groined ceiling, which may, possibly, have been the chancel. In line with, so as to be a continuation of, this chamber is the nave of the church. The two windows that alone lighted it are very narrow; but, then, in this part of the world windows are made as small as possible, for to admit a sufficiency of light would, for the greater part of the year, be to admit an intolerable quantity of cold.

Close to the church, in the direction of the castle, is a building about twenty feet square. The walls are about three feet thick. Their stones in some courses are laid horizontally, in others in a slanting, or herringbone, position. Close to this is another building similarly constructed, but more dilapidated. This is not quite so wide as it is long. It has remains of a floor above the ground floor.

Just beyond these two last mentioned buildings is the true castle. It is of very solid construction, but of no great extent. I paced it, but do not remember its exact dimensions. My impression is that it is not so much as a square of forty feet. Neither the door, nor windows, were arched. The latter are in the form of embrasures, much recessed, of course to admit to the interior as much light as possible through such small openings, and to enable its defenders to command as much space as possible outside. The lowest of these embrasures is at a considerable height from the ground. Half the basement is occupied by a spacious excavation in the living rock, which doubtless was the cellar. This is the first necessity in every dwelling place in this part of Switzerland, where the winters are so severe, and some days in summer very hot. If the cellar of a house does not prove good, that is to say, if it should prove incapable of keeping wine, cheese, milk, beer, meat, and in these days potatoes, from the cold of winter and the heat of summer, the house itself is of little value. This large rock-cellar doubtless answered well the purpose for which it was designed. I pictured it to myself stored with hogsheads of wine, barrels of flour, salt beef and bacon, and tiers of cheese, against the annually recurrent siege of winter, or an expected summer siege from the lord of some neighbouring castle. There was plenty of everything, for those were days when rapid digestion waited upon vigorous appetite, and eating and drinking were the great business of life. There were three stories. The large stone fire-place of the first of these remains. Its chimney is carried up, and against, the inner wall, almost as if it had been an after-thought. Does the existence of this chimney throw any light on the date of the structure? We can hardly suppose such a chimney of earlier date than the fourteenth century, but as it appears to have been applied to the wall, and not constructed in it, the wall may be of much greater age than the chimney. There are no traces of chimneys elsewhere in the building. A court-yard surrounded the castle. This included at the angle, between the two precipitous faces of the extremity of the mountain, a space that might have been a garden, or a yard for the live stock in troublous times. It is now laid down in grass for mowing. The castle itself did not stand upon the edge of the precipice. Between it and the precipice, indeed on the very edge of it, are the remains of some small buildings. These, as probably did the three other buildings first mentioned, must have supplied the stabling for horses and cattle, and storehouses for provisions and hay in ordinary times. The church could not have been intended for more than thirty or forty people. This, and the small dimensions of the castle itself, furnish us with some data for forming an estimate of the wealth and power of its original builder, and of his successors. One cannot suppose that his retainers comprised more than about a dozen families. And perhaps the same may be said of the retainers of those who possessed the dozen other castles of the immediate neighbourhood. In descending I took the regular old road down to Sils, for I wished to go the way the old feudal chief and his retainers had used. To one either going to, or coming from Thusis, this way is quite a mile longer than the timber slide.

We read a good deal in Swiss histories of the way in which in many places the peasants rose against their feudal lords, expelled or killed them, and dismantled or burnt their castles. At all events there was once an abundance of these lords, and we cannot suppose that they voluntarily abandoned their strongholds, and their lands. We see the ruins of a great many of these strongholds, and we see the peasants now in possession of the lands which once supported these strongholds. This, if like things are to be called by like names, is neither more nor less than what French, German, Italian, and Spanish Internationalists are aiming at. Here, in these valleys, as far as the land is concerned, their scheme has for many generations been thoroughly carried out. Lands which feudal lords once held peasants now hold. The substitution of one proprietary for the other was in many cases brought about by the direct use of physical force, in others by the peaceable, it might have been, expression of the will of the community, backed, however, by physical force: which comes to precisely the same thing. And now this peasant proprietorship has had several centuries to develop its nature completely, without any retarding, or disturbing causes operating against it. Whatever merits, therefore, and whatever demerits the system may have, may be seen here, for no one would assert that it can be without either the one, or the other. Some estimate of each I endeavoured to make in my first 'Month in Switzerland' of two years back; and in my second 'Month' of last year, I endeavoured to direct attention to the history, and to the present action, in this age of capital, of the Allmends, or commonable lands of Switzerland, which in the days anterior to accumulations of capital were, in Switzerland at all events, a necessary appendage to peasant proprietorship. All that I now wish to remark is that that portion of the land which is held as private property, has for a long time been divided into such small holdings, and from absence of settlements, trusts, and charges, has been so completely at the disposal of existing proprietors, as would probably satisfy the most extreme Internationalist, who was in favour of permitting any private rights at all in the land.

THE VIA MALA--SCHAMSTHAL--ANDEER.

Living things, and things inanimate, Do speak at heaven's command to eyes and ears, And speak to social reason's inner sense With inarticulate language.--WORDSWORTH.

The Via Mala though of the same character as the Schyn is both more diversified and more astonishing. The roadway itself is wider, and of more solid construction than that of its neighbour; nor is it all on one general level, for, as you advance along it, you are generally ascending or descending. It also crosses from side to side, being carried over the stream by bridges, which here it has been necessary to build at a great height above the stream. The ravine, too, is not so uniformly wedge-shaped, but in places the opposite side will appear to be almost, or perhaps will be quite, perpendicular. There is indeed one instance of its actually leaning towards you. The hammers and chisels of the old world would never have made this road. Gunpowder it was that rendered its construction possible, and we may almost say that made the want of it felt. It first made the old castles indefensible, and the man-at-arms as good a man in the field as the armoured knight; in other words it first helped to sweep away such impediments to production, freedom of exchange, and accumulation as the Hohen Rh?tiens of mediaeval Europe; and when they were gone, and in consequence production had increased, and facilities for communication became necessary, what had aided in abolishing the castles was found capable also of aiding in the construction of the road. We may suppose that the inventors of this explosive, as has been the case with most inventions, had no glimpse of the good work it would accomplish. They could have had no anticipations of its disestablishing feudalism, and constructing roads through the Alps. And even now we seem to be only feeling our way to some guesses of what will be the kind of work it will do in any future war, that is to say what effect it will have on the history of the future.

I observed as I was advancing along this Via Mala, in what good keeping with the sombreness of the ravines was the monotonous form of the pines. Were its trees of the kinds that are spreading in limb, and varied in form and foliage, it would imply that nature was more benignant than the other features of the scene suggest. But as it is, you find that only one kind of tree can live here, and that a little thought shows you is so constructed as to enable it to withstand the heavy snowfalls and violent gales of winter. Its branches are so short, perhaps somewhat shorter than they would be with us, and, too, so constructed, that they never can be called upon to sustain any great weight of snow, and the trunk tapers so regularly, like a well-made fishing rod, as to enable it to sustain the most sudden and violent storm blasts. The top yields to the pressure, but does not snap, because the stiffness of the stem is gradually increasing; and this, before the bottom has been reached, has increased to such a degree as to prevent any strain being felt by the roots. As you observe this adaptation of form and structure, the hardness of the conditions of the station that are inferred deepens the effect upon your thought of the hardness of the conditions that are seen.

At Thusis we had been told that the storm of the previous Sunday night had so swollen the Hinter Rhein as to have raised the water to within a few feet of the crown of the arch of the bridge. At the other extremity of the Via Mala--the place is called Reischen--we found that a bridge had been swept away. This had interrupted the traffic for twenty-four hours, when those who had charge of the road succeeded in laying some pine trunks across the chasm, and forming upon them a roadway of transverse squared slabs. We stopped a few minutes to see the diligence pass this improvised structure. The three leaders were taken out, as there was some chance that the dancing and rattling of the loose slabs might scare them. With this precaution the passage was effected easily.

I have already mentioned that on the first afternoon of this excursion I inspected the deep perpendicular channel of the Aare on the eastern side of the Kirchet to see if it presented any indications of its having been formed by any other agency than that of the stream that is now running through it. Every indication seemed to imply that the channel had been eroded by the stream, and by it alone. Every deep channel I passed, throughout this excursion, I looked at with the same thought in my mind, and I nowhere saw anything to suggest the operation of any other agent. And in this ravine, the most perpendicular and deepest of them all, I saw nothing that pointed to a different conclusion. Here a single arch is sufficient to carry you over the stream at a height of 300 feet above it. It is impossible to suppose but that the whole of these 300 feet were excavated by the stream that is now fretting at the bottom of them. If, then, you are certain that it cut out the 300 feet below you, what, except your niggardly ideas about the extent of past time, is there to prevent your supposing that it cut out the 1,300 feet above you? Believe the evidence of your eyes in this matter, and it will add a hundredfold to the interest with which you will contemplate this grand example of the method in which nature makes a stream cut a channel for itself through a mountain of solid rock. You will think how long she has been engaged in the work, and that she is now carrying it on with the same instrument, and applied in the same fashion, as thousands and thousands of years ago. The reason why in these gorges the rock is cut with comparative rapidity is that in them the stream is always both rapid and confined. Because it is rapid it is working with the greatest possible power, and because it is narrow that greatest power is applied at the greatest possible advantage, that is to say it is confined to the central straight line of the narrow bottom, for all the sand and stones are turned in from each side to that central line. Hence the rapidity, narrowness, and directness of the cutting action. When, however, the stream has passed out of the gorge into more level ground, it becomes diffused: it cannot, therefore, cut any longer at the bottom; and for its former tendency to directness of course is substituted a tendency to meandering.

From Zillis, the first village of the valley, where we stopped at the hotel de la Poste for half an hour, I counted five villages over the grassy slopes around me, and seven churches, generally on more or less conspicuous knolls. I was seated outside in the sun on a bench against the wall. The presence of a stranger soon attracted the curiosity of some children that were playing about in the street. A few cents secured their attention. I asked them why they were not at school. The schools here were not open, they told me, except in winter. During the four months of summer they are closed, in order that the children of these industrious peasants may learn to labour, as well as to read and write; and that the schoolmaster, too, may have as well as other people, time to get in his hay, or in some way or other to earn what will enable him to buy hay, for in this part of the world none can live without a cow.

And as it is with attendance at school, so is it to a great extent in these valleys with attendance at church: it is affected by times and seasons. I once asked a woman who was describing to me the rigour of the winter in one of these high valleys, whether she was speaking from experience? Did she live up here in winter? Of course she did. Where else had poor people to go?

'What do you do to pass the time?'

'In winter we go every day to church.'

'Why do you not go every day now?'

'Because we have now something else to do.'

The custom, then, of going to church, as I have often suspected is the case with prayer three times a day in the East, does not owe its existence and its maintenance exclusively to motives of a religious kind. It in some degree rests upon its giving people something to do, who otherwise would at the time have nothing to do, and upon its enabling them to indulge their sense of gregariousness. There is nothing mischievous, or reprehensible in this. Quite the contrary; for why in our efforts to keep alive our sense of the Unseen, and our moral sense, should we reject what aid may be obtained from the action of motives which, though not religious in the ordinary meaning of the word, are quite natural and very beneficial?

I found that in this valley, as is the case in most others, there are very few families who do not reside in houses of their own, and very few owners of houses who are without a bit of land of their own. This very much increased the interest with which I regarded the seven villages, and the multitude of little patches of green, and of gold, which tesselated the area around me of about a mile and a half in diameter, walled in by its amphitheatre of rugged mountains. To live in a house that is your own makes life pleasanter, and to cultivate a field that is your own makes labour lighter. The thoughts, the feelings, the lives of peasants who live in their own houses, and cultivate their own land are of a higher order than the thoughts, the feelings, the lives of those who do not; and where this underlies the picture, the scene is a pleasanter one to contemplate.

Having loitered much by the way it was midday when I entered Andeer. This is the chief place in the valley. It possesses many roomy substantially built houses, and is quite a little town. From its extent you would suppose that its population must exceed the 600 it is said to contain. All these towns, however, cover more ground than towns of equal population would with us from the fact that almost all the dwelling houses have annexed to them cow-houses with the hayloft in an upper story: and these cow-houses with haylofts over them are not readily distinguishable from dwelling houses. The hotel Fravi, at which I put up--I do not know whether there is another in the place--rehorses the diligences and carriages, which go to and fro over the Spl?gen. It is therefore a large establishment, making up many beds, and having stabling for about forty horses. The thickness of the walls of the hotel, nearly three feet on the third story, reminded me of the severity of the winter these 600 people have to get through, somehow or other, with their scanty means and humble appliances, when their houses are for months together half buried in snow, and they are walled in, as it were in a prison, with mountain-high snow barriers right and left, and every breath of air that reaches them is charged with most benumbing cold.

On this day, however, there was nothing to suggest the severities of an Alpine winter, except the preparations these good people were making for its advent. The depth of colour in the blue abyss, unflecked by cloud, and undimmed by a suspicion of mistiness, was such as we can know little of here in England. It was one of a succession of sunny days, that was following a spell of wet; and so every man, woman, and child was out making, or bringing in, hay. The shutters of almost every house in the town were up, indicating where their inmates were, and what they were about. Later in the day the results of the work of the day, and of the few fine ones that had preceded it, began to be seen in the streets. There was a constant succession of little trucks drawn by oxen, some on wheels, and some on runners, loaded high with fragrant hay. Those who could not afford oxen drew these trucks themselves, the mother and the little people often pulling it along together; and, to go a step still lower, those who could not afford the trucks, carried their hay in large bundles on their own backs. The sun was at the bottom of all this life and successful labour; and the warmth he was pouring down into the valley to-day would keep these industrious families alive in the winter. The amount of air, too, was just what was enough for their haymaking. To one sitting outside the hotel, close by its row of poplars, watching the arrival of the hay harvest, the breeze appealed to four senses at once. You felt the contact of its crisp freshness; you heard the rustling, and saw the quivering of the aspen leaves as it moved by them; and it brought to you the fragrance of the new hay. Later in the day when the hay was housed, and the fields were wet with dew, you heard the blacksmith's hammer repairing the damages the good people's tools had sustained, and the wood-cleaver's axe preparing to-morrow's fuel. For in this part of the world all trades work till 8 P.M., having begun at 5 A.M.; two hours in the middle of the day being appropriated to rest--two sacred hours, the sabbath of each day--which are most religiously observed everywhere, even at the post-office bureau. And these men who were now working on till eight, had been at work all day in the hay-field, from which they had only been driven by the heavy dew of such an evening, following such a day, at such a height.

AVERSTHAL.

Will Fortune never come with both hands full? She either gives a stomach and no food-- Such are the poor, in health; or else a feast And takes away the stomach--such are the rich That have abundance, and enjoy it not.--SHAKESPEARE.

Beyond this point we found that the road had again been carried away. A straight-sided gully had lately been cut through it to the depth of about eight feet. Four men were here at work making a cutting for the road down to the bottom of the newly-formed gully. In such a place it would have been of no use to refill the excavation, because the incoherent material used for this purpose would be carried away by the next rain. They had instead of this sunk the road to the bottom of the gully on the lower side. Up the perpendicular eight feet of the upper face, which they had not yet begun to make practicable, we had to climb by the aid of a few projecting roots. If our hold of the roots, or the roots' hold of the soil, had failed--of course there was but slight chance of either of these possibilities occurring--we should have tumbled down about sixty feet into the Bach, for as the road was along the edge of a precipice, a fall from the face of the gully would have been a fall down the precipice also.

It had been part of my Machiavelism for this day to take with us nothing to eat, in order to ensure our getting at all events as far as Cresta. The stratagem had been quite successful, for having stopped nowhere by the way, except for the tub of milk at Campsut, we reached Cresta at 11.30 A.M. And fortunate it was that we had started early, the result of the other successful little ruse I have already mentioned, and had had no delays on the road, for we had not been at Cresta half-an-hour when it began to rain, the rain being diversified only with snow for twenty-two hours.

The good man's wife was not now visible. She had for some months been suffering from a serious illness, and had not yet seen a medical man; nor, whatever turn her illness might take, was there much chance of her seeing one, because it would require two days for one to come and return, St. Moritz in the Engadin being the nearest point from which assistance of this kind could be had. Here, therefore, medical advice and medicines can only be received through the post. The poor woman's illness threw much of the work of the house upon him, in which, however, he was aided by a sturdy Romansch-speaking damsel.

Then there was the view from the window. This, from a height above the stream of about 500 feet, commanded the valley and the opposite range. The lower half of this range was covered with the open forest of cembra, a part of which we had passed through in the forenoon. Above the forest was Alpine pasture. All along the ridge the line that divided the forest from the pasture was perfectly straight: nowhere did the forest encroach on the grass, or the grass on the forest. On entering the forest above Crot we had seen some larch, but there was none, I believe, opposite to Cresta, nothing but cembra. Nor were there any young trees in the forest, though the old ones stood at such a distance from each other as to give sufficient pasturage for a herd of cows I could just make out as I stood at the window. I could also make out with a glass a flock of goats in the forest, and that accounted to me for the absence of young trees. I had often observed that the goat cannot kill the young spruce, of which the forests generally consist. Of course they bite off the new terminals of the leader, and of the laterals, but not quite to the bottom of the new wood. The terminals, therefore, of the laterals, though bitten back every year, still gain an inch or two every year; and as this makes the plant grow into a very compact and bushy form, the time comes when the goat can no longer reach over the compact mass of laterals to bite off the terminal of the leader. That was only to be got at so long as its enemy could reach over to it. Every year the enemy is forced back a little; and so in a dozen or twenty years it is no longer able to reach it. The terminal of the leader then advances in safety, and a tree is quickly formed. All that has happened is, that it was delayed some years in making its start. But during this period of delay the roots were spreading far, and establishing themselves with a good hold of the ground; when, therefore, the start at last is made, the growth is very rapid. You may always distinguish the trees that had in their early days been kept back for a time in this way, for the lower part of their trunks, the three or four feet nearest the ground, are always crooked. This indicates how they had been maltreated by the goats. So it is with the ordinary pine of the Swiss forests. Of the cembras, however, I observed that they could not escape the goats in this way, or in any way; either because the bite of these animals is at once destructive to them, or because having been bitten back they have not the power of forming a compact bush, and so of rising eventually out of harm's way. At all events the goats kill the young trees of this species; and this will account for so many forests of cembra having died out, or now being in process of dying out. One would suppose that this cause of their destruction would be guarded against in these lofty Grison valleys, some of which are rendered habitable only by the supply of wood furnished by what remains of ancient forests of this species, which is the only Swiss conifer that grows at such heights. But in this valley of Oberland Aversthal there is some peat; its inhabitants, therefore, are not entirely dependent for fuel on their single forest of cembra opposite to Cresta. Their dependence, however, upon it for material for the construction of their houses is complete. When, therefore, their one forest shall have been consumed they must either take to building with stone, or abandon the valley as a place of residence.

It was interesting to watch the effects of the snow storms, which throughout this afternoon alternated with showers of rain, and will continue to do so till 10 A.M. to-morrow. On our side of the valley, which, as it faced the south, had been heated by the sun of the forenoon and of yesterday, the snow never lay on the ground. On the opposite side every fall of snow completely whitened the Alpine pasture above the forest, but rarely extended any way down into the forest; and on the few occasions when it did was very soon gone. When we left the place the following day all the pasture above the forest was white, but the turf between the trees was free from snow. Of course the ground beneath the trees is somewhat warmer than in the open, as every animal knows when it chooses its night's resting-place; still the visible difference between the two suggested the questions of whether there is not what may be roughly regarded as a line for the snow that falls in summer, and whether it is this supposed line of summer-falling snow which defines the upper limit of the forest by preventing above that limit the germination of seeds or by killing the young plants in the tender stage of their first growth.

The school of Oberland Aversthal is held in his house. A large room on the ground-floor has been fitted up for this purpose. Considering how poor the peasants are, I was surprised at the excellence of the fittings. The room had double windows, and an excellent stove, which was of such dimensions that I was at a loss to imagine how it could have ever been brought up the valley. There were good desks and benches, master's desk and blackboard. In short, the apparatus was as good as could be wished. All this is accounted for by remembering that, though it is provided by the peasants, it is provided for their own children. Every family in the valley has a strong personal interest in the school; and this concentration of personal interest upon the school-room issues in its being the best furnished room in the commune. And as the minister is the master, we may suppose that the teaching and tone of the school is correspondingly good. Of course here, as elsewhere in these parts, the school is open only during the winter months, which, however, at an altitude of 6,400 feet, that of the schoolroom--Juf is some hundreds of feet higher--must comprise nine months of the year.

Off the schoolroom was the guests' chamber, whose wants had been taken into account in the construction of the house. In this everything was brightly clean. It contained two beds, and about a dozen volumes in German. Behind these two rooms was the hall, or store-room, of the house. Above the school-room was the sitting-room. On either side of this was a bed-room. Behind these were some small rooms, in one of which my porter was berthed.

The Canton had been desirous that a road should be constructed through the valley to connect either the Upper Engadin, or Casaccia, below the Maloja, with the Spl?gen road; and with a view to this the preliminary surveys had been made. The proposal, however, was so distasteful to the peasants, that it had been withdrawn for the present. This reminded one of the opposition that was made to the Great Western Railway by the authorities of a famous University; an opposition which has left its mark on the railway map of England, for it diverted the railway from its intended course, both to the cost of the shareholders and to the inconvenience of the University. The unlettered ignorance of the peasants of Oberland Aversthal has come to the same conclusion as did the learned Doctors of Oxford. They both alike argued, we are no part of the world; the world is wicked, and will invade us; we are no match for the world. Fortunately not. The result in the case of Overland Aversthal will be what it was in the case of the famous University. The wicked world will in the end have its way, and the opponents of the wicked world will come to acknowledge that it is not a bad way, and that they are none the worse for accommodating themselves to it: in fact, that they are themselves a part of the world, and cannot do without it.

But the above-mentioned bag, full of such beneficent magic, for it was magic that disclosed to every family what their hearts were yearning to know, and what their business required, was not on this afternoon the whole of the walking postman's load. There was also on his back an osier basket for our host. He had made preparations for its reception; but the chubby little fellow, who had conducted us to his father's house, was the first to announce its arrival. He and his father were soon out in the rain, opening it carefully so as not either to injure the basket, or rudely to shake its contents, I should have said its inmates, for on raising the lid there were revealed to their delighted eyes three geese--three live geese. A little enclosure had been got ready for them, to which they were forthwith transferred, the good man carrying two, and the chubby little fellow the third. They already had half-a-dozen chickens: the only ones I saw in the village, or, indeed, in the valley. This, then, was a great and interesting addition to the live stock of Oberland Aversthal; though now, on recalling the conditions of the place, I cannot imagine how they were to be kept through the winter, or, indeed, how they were to be kept at any time out of harm's way: for they needs must sooner or later get down to the Bach, from which there would not be much chance of their coming back alive, as they would probably, in their first attempt to navigate it, be dashed to death against the rocks. But whatever might be the issue of the experiment, the good opinion of our host I was already disposed to form was further strengthened on my finding that he was fond of tending animals. It was, too, an experiment that might, I wish I could say must, add to the companions and the resources--there is a little jar in that word resources--of his neighbours, whose lives up here above the clouds are somewhat wanting in objects of ordinary earthly interest.

But the arrival of the geese by the post carries us back to our argument that the post is a preparation for the at present much dreaded road. Will not these good people some day come to see that if it is advantageous to have a path that admits of the postman bringing to them three geese in a basket, and other such things, that it would be more advantageous to have a road that would admit of the diligence post, or the carrier's cart, bringing them many other things they want, but which are beyond the carrying power of the postman? This is a question we may be sure will occur to them, and be discussed, in their long winters; and, too, we may be sure that the young people, who will have been brought up by the minister in the well-appointed school the old people are maintaining, will upon this subject for the most part be of a different way of thinking from the old people.

What a life does this imply! What a weary winter! What dreary confinement to the small comfortless house, with the snow piled up to the windows of the first floor, month after month! How must the returning warmth of the sun, and the first glimpses of the green grass be hailed! How must every hour of the few days of their little summer be prized! In that brief space they have to provision the garrison of each home for the ensuing nine months. Their chief care is for their hay, the one store upon which ultimately the lives of all, both man and beast, depend. We may be sure they do not lose an hour of daylight. It is fortunate they cannot cut their grass by moonlight. If they could, there would be some probability of their working themselves to death. They could not cut it by moonlight, because, though thick enough on the ground, much of it is only a few inches long--not longer than what I have often seen the mowers leaving behind them in English meadows. You see no waste of that kind here, for these careful people mow very smooth, and very near the ground. And then they know that their few days of possible summer are always more or less abridged by summer snow-storms. How then must they be rejoiced in their hearts when two or three bright, breezy days come together, and enable them to get up what had been previously cut! How heavily are they weighted in the race they have to run for their lives against time!

There had, then, been much to do, and there had not been much time for doing it. There was the wood for fuel and for repairs that had been felled in the previous winter, and that had to be brought in before the hay was made. And there was the turf, too, that had to be stored; and that also had been dug before the hay was made, that every hour of sunshine might be utilized for drying it, and for making the hay--the precious hay, to which everything must be subordinated, for upon it everything depends. And that, too, after many delays and anxieties, has at last been won, and is now safe under cover. The whey-fed old sow, or the full-grown hog in about the condition they would be with us when put up to fatten, and the old cow now past milk, have returned home for desiccation. The cows, whose day is not yet done, are being comfortably housed. The rye and maize flour, the potatoes, the brandy, the coffee, the hemp and wool for the women to spin and weave, are all being provided as expeditiously as possible. But time is running these preparations hard, even if it does not show a-head of them, for the snow has already fallen so deep that the ground will be no more seen by the peasants of Ober Aversthal till next year. The long dreadful winter is again upon them.

JUF--THE FORCELLINA--THE SEPTIMER--CASACCIA.

Yet still e'en here content can spread a charm, Redress the clime, and all its rage disarm. Tho' poor the peasant's hut, his feast tho' small, He sees his little lot the lot of all.--GOLDSMITH.

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