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AN OBERLAND CHÂLET

THE CHÂLET

Grindelwald Lower Glacier

AN
OBERLAND
CHÂLET

By EDITH ELMER WOOD

NEW YORK WESSELS & BISSELL CO. 1910

Copyright, 1910, by
WESSELS & BISSELL CO.
October

THE PREMIER PRESS
NEW YORK

Affectionately dedicated to the other occupants of the Châlet Edelweiss.

THE WETTERHORN SEEN THROUGH THE TREES FROM THE FAULHORN PATH

ILLUSTRATIONS

FRITZ BINER, THE GUIDE

APOLOGIA

At a period when everybody travels, and the yearly number of English-speaking visitors in Switzerland is counted by the hundred thousand, the writer who presumes to offer the long-suffering public a book of Swiss impressions would seem to be courting the yawn reserved for the N^th repetition of the Utterly Familiar. But the discoverer of a new country still has, I believe, some privileges. It might even be considered selfish of one who had found the way back to Arcadia to keep the sailing directions secret. And though there are countless tourists who know the Swiss hotels and mountain railroads, numerous villa people well versed in the tennis and golf facilities of Montreux or Lucerne, and a goodly company of Alpinists who can tell you all about guides and ropes and the ascent of the Matterhorn, there never was anybody who got out of a Swiss summer precisely what we did, or who, in fact, knows our own particular private Switzerland at all.

In the beginning, there were but four—no, five—of us,—Belle Soeur and my two Babes and I and our good French Suzanne, who, besides looking out for the Younger Babe, performed various useful functions about the house. After some six weeks Frater and his college chum, Antonio, dropped in on us from their commencement across the sea, and a few days later the Mother.

Now the Husband-and-Father, who is also the brother of Belle Soeur, and incidentally a naval officer, had been ordered from the Mediterranean, where he had been cruising, to the Philippines, which are not so nice, especially for Babes, particularly in summer. So, instead of following him when we gave up our little villa on the hills above Nice the first of June, we moved into Switzerland. None of us had ever been there before except the Chronicler and the Mother, who had spent the usual sort of summer there when the Chronicler was a small child. We knew we wanted to be high enough for bracing air, as far as possible from tourist centers and among the really and truly great and lofty mountains. So we went to Interlaken for a start and hunted around among the neighboring mountain villages till we found what we were after. And on the tenth day we moved into the Châlet Edelweiss, which lies about a mile and a half from the Grindelwald station on the road to the Upper Glacier, and started housekeeping.

It did not seem very propitious that first day. It was raining dismally when we got off the train; the roads were full of mud, and the clouds had rolled down over the mountains, so that nothing could be seen but the big brick Bear Hotel and the ugly village street lined with shops and restaurants. I tried to remember how beautiful it had been the day I was in Grindelwald house-hunting, and the others tried to act as if they believed what I was telling them about it, but I knew they didn’t, and they knew I knew they didn’t. When we got to the house, it, too, was depressing. On the bright sunshiny day when I had seen it before, it had looked primitive enough, but now it seemed aggressively barren and comfortless. Was it possible that we could live in this barn for four months? I could see the effort the family were making to act as if they liked it—all but the Younger Babe, who made no effort at all, but got frankly quivery about the lower lip and begged to be taken back to the Villetta Valentine at Nice or even to the hotel in Interlaken. “I don’t like this house!” he said. “It’s an ugly house. It’s not a happy little home. It’s ugly. It hasn’t got any ‘fings’ in it. It hasn’t even got any paper on the wall!”

Now, this was quite true. Walls, ceilings and floors were all of the same, well-scrubbed, unpainted pine boards, and “fings” were limited to strictly essential furniture of the plainest type. And it’s wonderful how little is strictly essential when you get down to it. But at the age of three material accessories are apt to assume an exaggerated importance. Every infant is by nature a snob till the tendency is reasoned or spanked out of him.

With wholly artificial buoyancy, we wandered over the house, apportioning beds and rooms and hunting for something to cheer up the Babe. We found it to a certain extent in what he dubbed the two “Charmantes bêtes” which stood in the dining-room. They were stuffed chamois, and all summer we intended asking if the Herr Secundärlehrer had shot them himself, but somehow we got away without settling the question. A wreath awarded to him as first prize at a Schützenfest, which hung framed on the wall, made it seem quite likely that he did shoot them. These two bêtes formed, with a melodion, a narrow deal table and six chairs, the furniture of the dining-room. The rooms had only been differentiated into dining-room, sitting-room and bedrooms for our benefit. The furniture had all been jumbled up when I saw the house before, and every room except the kitchen had had one or more beds in it.

I wonder if I can make you see the Châlet Edelweiss? It is the regulation Oberland châlet of the better type,—exactly like the tooth-pick boxes if you don’t know it otherwise. The basement is of whitewashed concrete and contains a small grocery store kept by the Frau Secundärlehrer when she isn’t teaching school or farming, and which she said she was sure would not annoy us because it was so very small and hardly anybody ever came there to buy anything. There isn’t any basement at the back of the house because the sloping hillside brings the ground to the level of the kitchen and dining-room windows. Our part of the châlet consists of two stories of unpainted wood, surmounted by a big red roof. The shutters are painted bright green. At both ends of the house are broad two-storied balconies. The only staircases are on the balconies. There are moments when this is inconvenient. Above the second-story windows on the front of the house runs a legend in large black Gothic letters, saying that the Secundärlehrer and his wife caused this house to be built by such and such a master carpenter. Some of the houses in the village have verses or mottoes painted on them, and we always regretted a little that ours did not. It was rather nice to see the wife’s name associated with the husband’s in this matter. Doubtless her dowry had helped build the house, certainly her industry was helping to maintain it. But it was rather decent of him to recognize the fact.

The châlet has been built only two years, so its timbers have not acquired the rich sepia and burnt-Sienna tones which make the old ones such a joy to the eye. But the new kind is better to live in!

The house stands just above the highroad. Behind it the green Alpine meadows roll steeply upward to the Faulhorn ridge, which separates Grindelwald valley from the depression occupied by Lake Brienz. There are between four and five thousand upward feet in this direction, we being at about the four-thousand-foot level ourselves. Below the road, the land runs down rapidly to the rushing Lütschine, the stream which drains the glaciers. We can hear the roar of the water plainly, especially at night. From the other side of the stream rise almost precipitously the rocky cliffs of the Mettenberg, getting up about ten thousand feet. To the left the gleaming snow and ice of the Upper Glacier, then the square gray, snow-capped mass of the Wetterhorn. To the right the Lower Glacier, with broad white firns and snow peaks, and to the right of the glacier the knife-edged Eiger. These three giants fill up our whole immediate foreground. Far to the right is the saddle-like depression known as the Kleine Scheidegg, where the mountain railroad runs over into the Lauterbrunnen Valley, and to the left of the Wetterhorn, the narrow end of the Grindelwald Valley is closed by a similar saddle,—the Grosse Scheidegg, which separates it from the Rosenlaui Valley. To the extreme right is the rift in the mountains through which the Lütschine escapes and the railroad gets down to Interlaken. But it was all veiled in mist the first day. We couldn’t see fifty feet in any direction. There were some few tantalizing glimpses as the clouds began to break apart about sunset. But the family had to take on faith the “glorious views” I had described till next morning.

The one heart-warming spot in the chilly interior of the châlet that first afternoon was the kitchen, where the Frau Secundärlehrer, in the kindness of her heart, assisted by her little Dienst-Mädchen, was beating up the eggs and milk, which I had asked her to get for me, into an omelet. We really had no use for an omelet at half-past four in the afternoon, but we would not have dampened her hospitable zeal by letting her see our lack of appetite. So we sat down dutifully at the deal table between the melodion and the stuffed chamois and ate it. Then the Frau and her handmaiden bade us good-night and left us—masters of all we surveyed, including a fine crop of partially repressed blues.

Who would ever have guessed this was the opening scene of the finest summer that ever happened?

II

There is nothing particularly joyous about the process of starting a new house running anywhere at any time. Experta crede. But when you are a stranger in a strange land, whose language you are imperfectly acquainted with and whose inhabitants are as uncommunicative as oysters and inclined to regard the foreigner as an enemy till he has proved the contrary, the difficulties are considerably aggravated.

Among the rank and file of the people in the German cantons of Switzerland, there seem to be three classes:—those who have come in contact overmuch with tourists and have been spoiled by it; the low-browed, stupid type, surly and hostile; and the honest, intelligent, fresh-cheeked, unspoiled, who are never effusive, but frank always and friendly to those who seem to deserve it, staunch, reliable, independent, self-respecting, in every way admirable,—the bone and sinew and hope of Switzerland. The first class are nearly as extortionate and conscienceless as their confrères in France and Italy without the charming Latin manners that make one forgive their iniquity. At their worst, this type is insufferable. But one can escape. Two miles off the tourist tracks, one never finds them.

The second class one can only be sorry for. It is not their fault that their brains and bodies are stunted by cretinism or intermarriage of relatives or insufficient nourishment or too much carrying of heavy burdens. Their skin is sallow, eyes dull, features heavy. One usually finds them tending cattle, whom they closely resemble, or inhabiting isolated châlets. If you speak to them, they either stare open-mouthed and answer nothing, or in the most unsatisfactory manner. I do not know whether they are capable of affection for their own people. They certainly waste none of it on outsiders.

There was a man of this type who lived in a châlet on the hill above us, who came out and hit the Elder Babe a resounding cuff on the head, ejaculating some wrathful Swiss German, which the poor Babe did not in the least understand. The Babe was doing nothing more sinful than looking in the grass for a pen-knife he had lost, but doubtless this man, with his poor cramped crooked wits, suspected him of some deep-dyed villainy.

There was also a boy in the neighborhood about twelve years old, who used to lie in wait for the Elder Babe with a large stick and attack him viciously. I would have let the Babe (who was seven) fight it out with him, trusting to the triumph of mind over matter, if the lad had not been so absolutely unintelligent and brute-like in appearance that I thought he might crush the Babe’s skull with a rock or push him off a precipice if he was angered.

Every once in a while one hears of some queer stupid outrage in Switzerland—the tires of an automobile chopped up or obstructions put at a dangerous turn in the road to upset a traveling carriage. I imagine it is always one of these quasi-deficients who is responsible for it.

In the whole world I do not know a finer people, nor one more charming to deal with, than the healthy, intelligent class of Swiss, God-fearing, law-abiding, domestic, industrious, self-respecting, clean in mind and body. When I had once beaten my way through their uncommunicativeness and learned where I could get the necessities of life, I found it indescribably restful, after the perpetual battle over trifles of my eight months’ housekeeping on the Riviera, to throw myself on the mercy of these good people, secure in the consciousness that they would take no advantage of my ignorance, and that the price of an article would be the same whether I asked before buying it or after.

One of the brothers of the family that kept the meat shop was a guide in his leisure moments and was building up a fine reputation for skill and daring. While we were in Grindelwald he covered himself with glory by successfully doing some things that had never been done before. With an Alpinist from Berne, he crawled along the knife-blade edge of the Eiger, Heaven knows how many hours without sleep or rest or proper food, without standing up or sitting down, just clinging and creeping,—a feat which had been accomplished only once many years ago. It was pretty to see how proud his family were of him. A younger brother especially, once his shy reserve was overcome by sympathetic questions, talked about him as though he had won the Victoria Cross at the very least. I do really think they were the only firm of butchers I ever met who did not need to be watched while weighing the meat!

The bakery people were admirable, too, especially the young, rosy-cheeked wife, who usually tended shop, and the bright-faced little girl who brought the bread each morning. They had a small grocery attachment to the bakery, but I found it was not etiquette for me to buy there anything which I could get from the Frau Secundärlehrer in our basement. In the bakery one day I saw some packages of tapioca stacked up on a shelf, and, with the Babes in mind, ordered some sent next morning. It did not come and, supposing it had been overlooked, I stopped in later to get it. “My little girl took it up this morning with the bread,” said the baker’s wife, smiling sweetly, “but she found the Frau Secundärlehrer kept it in stock, so of course she brought it back.” I must have looked a little blank, for she added, “The Frau Secundärlehrer might think it strange if you got it from us instead of her.”

Having learned this local canon, I struggled dutifully to conform to it, though it was by no means always convenient. The Frau Secundärlehrer’s store was open only at odd times when the Frau was at leisure. It was always closed during the morning hours when one usually makes purchases for the day. After sending the cook to the village in the morning for marketing and piously leaving some grocery article to be purchased from the Frau in the afternoon, it was hardly soothing to find that she was just out of it or had never had it—and the nearest other grocery a mile and a half away!

There may have been other local rules of procedure equally sacred that I never did find out, and so unwittingly offended against to the end. I do not believe the Schweizer would be forgiving toward shortcomings of this sort. He is beautifully confident that the Herr Gott approves of Swiss ways and dislikes foreigners, and this gives him a virtuous rigidity in resisting innovations. There may have been some such all-unconscious sin on my part to account for the strange behavior of the Herr Secundärlehrer at the end of the season. But we won’t worry about that till the time comes.

The way we got our milk is worth describing. The cattle went up to the high pastures a few days after our arrival. They went by our house, and all day long we heard the tinkle of the cow-bells, the tramping of their patient feet, and the pushing and rubbing of their heavy swaying bodies, and the air was full of their breath as though we were in a dairy-yard. All the cattle in the valley go up about the middle of June (as soon as the snow is off the ground) and come down the latter part of September. The pasture lands are owned by the commune, and each burgher of the valley has the right to keep a certain number of cows there. There is a head-man in charge of each commune’s cattle, who, with a corps of assistants, lives up on the heights all summer. Their chief occupation is cheese-making. They are allowed such milk and cheese as they need for themselves during the summer (which, with coarse black bread, practically forms the whole of their diet), and at the end of the season receive a share of the cheese made in lieu of wages, the rest going per capita to the cattle-owners. Meat and eggs are scarce and dear, and this cheese forms the staple of the valley’s food through the winter.

In the more distant pastures, all the milk not drunk by the cattle men is made into cheese, but from these Alps near Grindelwald a certain amount of fresh milk is sold, being brought down six or eight miles each morning strapped to the back of a man, in a cylinder of white unpainted wood that must hold from ten to fifteen gallons.

Do not imagine that we learned all this at once. It represents the wisdom of the summer, gathered and pieced together, bit by bit. All we knew just then was that more cows than we had ever seen in our lives were going past, and it was a good thing that they were not nervous animals, or their bells would surely drive them crazy. Most of them were small affairs hung around the neck from a narrow leather collar. But sometimes the collar was as much as four inches wide and the bell a great jangling piece of metal seven or eight inches long and about the same width. It must have been a real burden for the cow to carry and the stiff collar a severe infliction. We never did learn the philosophy of these vagaries in cow adornment.

The Herr Secundärlehrer told us, on inquiry, during those first days, that the Alpine milk was the best to be had, although it cost more, and that perhaps he could secure it for us during the summer (it was a favor, you understand) if we would say definitely what amount we would take. It could neither be increased nor decreased afterwards and it must be paid for all together at the end of the season. “But I prefer paying my bills each month,” I said. “Can’t be done,” he replied. It was very mysterious, but we let it go at that, and the milk was delicious.

Later, after the young men and the Mother had joined us, I found we needed more milk. I lay in wait for the man who brought the milk, after the cook had tried her hand on him in vain, and asked him if there was not some way by which we could get an extra liter or so per day. He was one of the stupid variety and his “Nein” was like the speech of a stone statue (if stone statues spoke), without a flicker of expression. Wouldn’t it be possible if we paid a higher price for it? Nein. Wasn’t there a head-man who would have the authority to sell me more if I went to see him? Nein. I think he regarded me as the Scarlet Woman referred to in the Scriptures and felt that his soul would be endangered by further parley. So he walked off without any nonsense in the way of apology or farewell.

The only milk then to be bought was what came up from Interlaken, and even that we could not buy direct, since the man who sold it did not go on his rounds so far as our house. The baker took in a liter for us and we sent for it in the afternoon, and it was often sour and always pale and watery.

The admixture of water was not entirely unknown in our Alpine milk, for Frater one day came upon a milk-bearer cheerfully filling up his vessel from a mountain brook. Perhaps he had stumbled and spilt some, or perhaps he had been thirsty and drunk some, and of course he had a precise and definite quantity to deliver. I will not believe he had sold any on the side. It would not be in character. And I do not believe it could have happened often, or the milk would not have been so good.

For the benefit of intending housekeepers in the Oberland, I would say that marketing, when one has learned the ropes, is an easy matter, if the family is blessed with good appetites and is contented with simple fare and small variety. In meat there was always veal and pork to be had, beef and mutton only occasionally. When we wanted poultry we had to send to Interlaken for it, and the price was appalling, thirteen francs for a pair of small chickens hardly enough for a meal. Nearly everybody owned a few chickens, but they would not sell them, and eggs were often hard to get. As for fresh vegetables and fruit, we were wholly dependent on a rascally Italian who kept a fruit shop for tourists near the station and charged tourist prices for inferior articles. The only time he ever gave us good value was toward the end of the season when Antonio happened to address him in Italian, and he and his wife glowed all over and heaped up the grapes in the bag. But that did not prevent them from palming off a collection of absolutely rotten pears on my poor unsuspecting cook the next day! No fruit is grown in the valley except a few late apples on the road down to Interlaken, and the little wild strawberries that come up for themselves in June, no vegetables except cabbages and carrots and the like, which each family toilfully raises for its own use and cannot be induced to sell. The Frau Secundärlehrer had some lettuce which she generously invited us to help ourselves to as long as it lasted, but she would not sell it. One hardly realizes that it is summer, for one has to depend so much on canned things. One learns to eat a lot of the local cheese, which is always good. And I must not forget the honey. It is the invariable accompaniment of the Swiss breakfast, which consists for the rest of rolls and butter, coffee and milk. When the bees have gathered their honey from the wild flowers on the Alpine meadows, the flavor is complexly delicious. One soon learns to despise the insipid lowland product.

I must not forget the salt, nor the long morning spent in hunting for that useful staple. I ordered it the first day from our basement grocery. It didn’t come, and I repeated the order. I was told the Frau had none. I supposed she was just out of it and asked Belle Soeur, who was going into the village, to get some at any grocer’s. She went dutifully to every grocer in the village and grew more and more puzzled at being everywhere told they didn’t keep it. She knew the Swiss used the condiment, for she had been eating it. She inquired and was told to go to the post-office. This sounded so perfectly foolish that she paid no attention to it and inquired elsewhere. She received the same answer. After she had been told three times to go the post-office, she went there, feeling distinctly idiotic as she asked the old man behind the stamp window if he sold salt. To her astonishment, the reply was affirmative. Salt, it appears, is a government monopoly in Switzerland, and, in Grindelwald at least, the postmaster had the exclusive right to sell it. In time it became perfectly natural to say, “Give me five postage stamps and a kilo of salt,” but it required practice.

III

Looking out on cocoa-palms and mango trees from my Puerto Rican balcony (whatever bad things may be said about the life of a naval officer’s wife, nobody ever accused it of monotony) it is hard to realize that last summer our outlook was on Alpine meadows and glaciers.... How can I catch and imprison in words that glorious Swiss air or the more elusive spiritual atmosphere of it all? How tint the pictures with that characteristic “local color” of which we talked so much that it became family slang?

The air at first was a little thin for us, and we easily got out of breath. Accustoming ourselves to it and gradually enlarging our climbing radius, we were soon doubling and by the end of the season nearly trebling our altitude without inconvenience. It was when we went down to the low levels that we felt oppressed by the dense air and fatigued by the heat. A sudden change of altitude either up or down most of us found produced clicking of the eardrums alternating with a wad-of-cotton-in-the-ear sensation. Antonio was like the man who couldn’t shiver. His eardrums wouldn’t click. Our assurance to him that there was nothing especially joyous in the sensation made no difference. He felt that he wasn’t in the swim, and it grieved him.

There was certainly a magic in the air. It made us all healthy and hungry and happy and filled us with the desire and eventually the ability to walk almost unlimited distances.

Belle Soeur, the Elder Babe and I did most of the preliminary exploring together. Shall I ever forget the beauty of the wild flowers that first month? They were lovely all summer, but never so lovely nor so many as during June, when the Alpine meadows in our vicinity were all blue with forget-me-nots or yellow and purple with little Johnny-jump-ups. I don’t remember the gentians till later, and I know the Alpenroses blossomed in July. The Swiss have a great sentiment for this flower, a sort of rhododendron whose clusters of pink blossoms growing on low scraggly shrubs color miles of mountain-side at the proper season. But they have no such loveliness as the dainty little flowerets that grow down in the grass. The Edelweiss cult, of course, is entirely a matter of sentiment. The furry, pulpy little plant, stalk, leaves, flowers, all of the same grayish, greenish white, has no trace of beauty and indeed does not look like a flower at all. Only its fondness for growing in dangerous and inaccessible places could make it desirable. There seems to be plenty of it, too, if you know where to go for it. During the season the tourist routes are lined with little solemn, silent children selling edelweiss. The supply never fails. But I may as well confess right here that though of course we purchased a certain amount of this article of commerce, we never found a sprig of it growing. We could doubtless have done so by paying a native to lead us to a proper place, but there would have been no sentiment in that. We were always hoping to come upon it accidentally, but we never did.

We soon decided that it was a waste of time to eat our meals in a stuffy little dining-room, looking out only at an upward slope of grass, even though it was adorned with two chamois and a Schützenfest prize. So we had the deal table and the chairs transferred to the more private of the lower balconies, the one that did not communicate with the street; and we found that the Eiger and Mettenberg and the Lower Glacier, the whole regal glory of our outlook, added a wonderful savor to our simple repasts,—changed the prosaic process of eating, in fact, into a sort of Magnificat. For it is true that there are places in this world which make even a pagan feel religious, and among all the winds and rains and fields and rivers and beasts and stars which “praise the Lord,” there are none which entone their hymns in a voice more inspiringly audible than the mountains which lift their snow-crowned heads so near to Heaven.

Is it surprising that the Swiss are a simple and an honest race? It seems to me it would be surprising if they were anything else. It must be almost a physical impossibility to lie in the presence of a glacier or on the edge of a precipice. Before these hoary Titans of mountains the complexities of our life fall away from us like dust from a shaken garment. All our artificial distinctions and sophistications become infinitely unimportant. Perhaps ants feel this way in the presence of the Pyramids, or flies who light on the buttresses of Cologne Cathedral.

After all, the Simple Life is not hard to live if you get the right setting for it.

We breakfasted, lunched, drank tea and dined on that balcony till the snow drove us indoors at the end of September. When it rained we pulled the table back into the shelter of the glass at the north end of the veranda. When it was cold, we put on overcoats and golf capes. As we lived with those mountains day by day, and grew to know all their moods and manners, good and bad, as one knows those of one’s truly intimates, they became to us, not scenery, but friends and kindred, not anything external, but a part of our larger selves.

We watched the snow line creep up at the beginning of the season and down again at the end. We watched the mountains hide themselves in black lowering clouds, saw them lit up by flashes of lightning, heard them roll back the thunder, saw them repent and hang out a rainbow from the Wetterhorn precipice across the white of the Upper Glacier and down in front of the Mettenberg, the upper peaks shake off their bad humor and emerge from the clouds all wet and shiny, rocks as well as snow, in the happy sunlight. Eiger is the same as ogre, etymologically, I suppose. Anyhow, it means giant, I have somewhere read. But when the wind blew fleecy white clouds across his gray flank and summit, half-hiding, half-revealing, the effect was as alluring as a chiffon veil on a beautiful woman. Then there was the delicate pink Alpenglow to hope for about simultaneously with dessert. Sometimes instead there were eerie green lights among firns and snowfields and white peaks above the Lower Glacier, wherefore one of them is named the Grindelwalder Grünhorn. And later, when the dinner things had been cleared away and the moon came up over the mountain walls of the valley, our world was too beautiful to be true. It was so exquisite that it almost hurt. It induced silence and a sort of swelling of the heart and an overpowering desire to be good....

Grindelwald Valley and Wetterhorn

I did not mean to be betrayed into a rhapsody. Permit me to call attention to the dash of “local color” on our dinner-table furnished by the cow-bell with which we summoned Suzanne from the kitchen. I have that cow-bell still among my most valued possessions. It and the bowl of wild flowers in the center of the table (not to mention the view) quite redeemed the meagerness of the Frau Secundärlehrer’s table linen and our consciousness that there were just exactly enough knives, forks, spoons, cups, saucers, plates and glasses to go around once and that they had to be washed between courses! If I wanted to ask anyone to dinner, I would have to send to the village to buy one more of everything!

I have now confided to you nearly everything I know about our housekeeping arrangements, but I have not even mentioned our good cook, Anna. This is not surprising, for she was the most unobtrusive person I ever met in my life. I secured her through an Interlaken employment agency, but she was not at all like the output of an employment agency in our own glorious land of the free. Her voice was so low and she was so timid and deprecatory that it was sometimes extremely difficult to find out what she was talking about. She was so superlatively meek that she seemed always to be inviting one to ill-treat her. I suppose it was this characteristic which made Suzanne bully her so at first. At Nice we had had a cook who kept Suzanne terrorized, drove her out of the kitchen with a poker and reduced her to daily tears. The joy of emancipation from that servitude, combined with Anna’s meekness, were evidently too much for her. This time it was Anna who wept. She came to me at the end of a fortnight and told me she would have to leave, that she seemed to be able to please Madame well enough, but that it was quite impossible to satisfy Suzanne. I told her to think better of it, reasoned with Suzanne and appealed to her sympathies (she has the best heart in the world), and the two soon became excellent friends.

Dear little mild, meek, faithful Anna, I do hope she is prospering! She was a widow and supported her three little children on the thirty-five francs a month she got from me. I put it up to forty-five, unsolicited, from pure sympathy, but I don’t suppose she could get more than half of that through the winter. She was bilingual,—French and German,—so it was easy for all of us to communicate with her, and she had pretty rosy cheeks and soft, good eyes.

I remember the time I asked her (speaking French) what they called a bureau (commode) in German. “On l’appelle comme ça,” she murmured flutteringly. “Comme ça?” I repeated. “But what do they call it?” “On l’appelle comme ça,” she said again more flutteringly than before. We bandied this back and forth until I thought we had struck an impasse like that of the famous story where the Englishman asks the Scotchman what there is in haggis. The Scotchman begins to enumerate, “There’s leeks intilt,” and the Englishman, not understanding the word, interrupts, “But what’s ‘intilt’?” “I’m telling ye,” says the Scotchman, “there’s leeks intilt.” “But I want to know what’s ‘intilt.’” “If ye’ll only keep quiet ye’ll know what’s intilt. There’s leeks....” And so it goes on forever. Anna and I would probably be doing the same until now, her voice growing more frightened and fluttering each time, had I not lost patience and exclaimed, “Comme QUOI, mon Dieu? Say to me in German, ‘There’s a bureau in my room.’” By which means I discovered that she meant the same word, commode, was used in German as in French.

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to tell a little more about our landlord and his family. The Herr Secundärlehrer, as might be inferred, taught in the higher grades at the big school-house, with so many lovely mottoes painted outside, at the edge of the village. He was evidently proud of his learned calling, for his title was inscribed on his cards and letterheads and invariably appended to his signature. But that, of course, is characteristically German. He was a good-looking man of about thirty, his face a trifle heavy in repose and just a little weak, but lighting up charmingly when he smiled. Like most Swiss, he carried himself rather slouchily. I don’t know how strenuously he may have labored during school hours, but he was nearly always resting out of them. Not so his wife. She was a teacher in the primary school, but that was merely an incident in her life. She also kept the store and cared for her three small children and took charge of the family housekeeping (with the aid of the little dienst-mädchen), did washing and sewing, and along in the late twilight would be standing by a table outside the door of the store (ready for a customer if one should come) ironing till the last ray of light faded. Or she and the dienst-mädchen would take hoe and spade and weed the cabbage patch or get the ground ready for planting turnips. While they did that, the masculine head of the family would sit on a bench smoking. They don’t spoil their women in Switzerland.

That reminds me of the local newspaper we subscribed to. It came three times a week and once in a while contained an illustrated supplement, with stories and poems, which were not exciting, but highly moral. The news part contained, besides local items of occasional interest, a quaint little summary of what was going on in the world, from the standpoint of the Grindelwald valley, and delicious editorials on such burning topics of the day as Love, Shakespeare, or the Sphere of Woman.

It was from the last that we culled the useful phrase, “Housely Herd.” I was reading it aloud to the assembled family, translating into English as I went, “The good God is not pleased,” I read (that editor was always well posted as to the Almighty’s views and sentiments)—“The good God is not pleased when women leave the housely herd and force themselves into business and professions for which He never intended them.” Now of course I should have translated “häuslicher Herd,” “domestic hearth,” but I honestly thought it was housely herd at the moment, and the phrase so beautifully expressed the masculine attitude of this pastoral people toward their women that it ought to have been true if it wasn’t. We therefore put it into our daily vocabulary, and the feminine part of the family joyously referred to itself as the Housely Herd all the rest of the season.

IV

The Younger Babe made friends with an Italian workman engaged in the construction of a châlet half a mile up the road and was presented by him with a piece of wall paper about a foot square. He bore it home in triumph and asked me to paste it up on the wall above his bed. The comfort he took in that reminder of what he regarded as civilization was really touching. He said he didn’t mind the house so much now that it had some wall paper in it.

Frater said afterwards that the Châlet Edelweiss must have been conducted as a young ladies’ boarding school previous to the arrival of himself and Antonio. This is a mistake on his part, but it is undoubtedly true that we led a much more quiet and decorous life before that invasion of Goth and Vandal. I am sure that the Secundärlehrer and his Frau held a much higher opinion of us at that time than they did later. They had never had the advantage of living in an American college town and were not educated up to “rough-house” nor to the unholy noises which were liable to issue from the Châlet at any hour of the day or night and which led Belle Soeur to christen it our private lunatic asylum.

It is rather curious, as we were none of us haters of our kind, that in the four months we spent in Grindelwald we never exchanged a word with any of the local English colony, which is fairly numerous. Doubtless most of the people who thronged the English chapel of a Sunday were transients, but a good many of the hotel people were there for the season, and there were quite a number of English families keeping house like ourselves in châlets, though mostly on the other side of the village. Somehow we seemed to be sufficient unto ourselves. Our mountains gave us all the outside company we wanted, and if ever we did pine for human intercourse there was much more “local color” in talking with Swiss peasants.

Our wildest form of diversion before the transatlantic contingent joined us was a picnic. Mostly it was combined with a tramp too long to be taken comfortably in half a day, but the Fourth of July picnic was celebrated very near the house so that the Younger Babe and Suzanne could accompany us. We chose a charming level green spot beside a babbling Alpine brook which the small boys nearly froze their feet wading. It was shaded by a fine big tree under whose branches we got an altogether glorious view of the Wetterhorn and Upper Glacier. The Fourth-of-Julyness was represented by some diminutive American flags we had purchased at a photograph shop in the village and six of those engines of war euphoniously yclept “nigger-chasers,” which we bought (the entire stock) at the druggist’s. This was the nearest we could come to fire-crackers. One was fired when we got up in the morning, a second after breakfast, one was reserved for sunset, one went off at high noon, and the remaining two immediately preceded and followed the ceremony of lunch.

Among our more distant picnics there stand out in my memory the climb to the Grosse Scheidegg and our two trips to the Männlichen.

The first Männlichen trip was spoiled by the weather. It is often impossible to tell on a cloudy morning whether the day will prove good or bad. This time we guessed wrong. Not having as yet acquired the climbing habit, we took the train to the Kleine Scheidegg and the footpath from there to the Männlichen. Instead of the early clouds blowing away, as we thought they would, they closed in densely, so that we found ourselves shivering in a thick fog, unable to see twenty feet before our noses. Still hoping the weather might change for the better, we made our way along the path, which was fortunately a perfectly plain and unmistakable one. The path in places ran between snow banks as high as our heads, and except these banks we saw no scenery. We sat down on a damp stone and ate our lunch, which was curiously cheerless. The weather grew worse and worse. Finally, just as it was beginning to rain hard, there loomed out of the mist ahead of us the Männlichen Inn, where we were more than glad to find shelter, hot milk and tea, and a fire.

The rain came down in torrents for several hours. By the time it let up, it was too late to catch the afternoon train at Scheidegg. Of course the sensible thing to do would have been to make up our minds to spend the night at the Männlichen Inn. But we had made no provisions for staying away over-night and knew that Suzanne and Anna would be very much alarmed at our failure to return.

Besides, the prospect of passing the rest of the afternoon and evening at that viewless inn, with nothing to read and nothing to do, was nowise alluring. So when it stopped raining and the clouds rolled down the mountain-side an eighth of a mile or so, we announced our intention of taking the footpath down to Grindelwald.

The waitress who pointed out the beginning of it to us plainly thought we were crazy, and perhaps we were. For two women and a small boy to start out at four o’clock in the afternoon to walk seven miles down a rain-soaked mountain-side, hunting for a path which for the first few miles would be a rude cow track, no different from countless others which would cross it or branch off from it, knowing that if they got lost or night overtook them they would find no human habitation to shelter them—well, it didn’t sound sensible! But the gods who protect the imprudent were with us.

We started down light-heartedly enough, glad to be on the move again, scrambling over rocks, swinging across the grassy places as fast as the clinging mud would let us, counteracting the chill of advancing evening by the strenuousness of the exercise we were taking. Once we had the good luck to meet a herd of cows from whose guardians we got a new set of directions. And again, just at a place where we were badly puzzled, we saw a lad toiling upward with an empty milk can on his back, whom we hailed and questioned.

Of course this sort of questioning is not an exact science. It must be remembered that our German was far from fluent, and that those people talked a local dialect very considerably different from the language of Goethe and Schiller, that they belonged to the dull, inarticulate section of the population and were not over-fond of foreigners. Moreover, everything in Switzerland has a name of its own, and the topographical directions of a peasant bristle always with unfamiliar proper names, which one strains one’s ear to catch, wildly guessing whether they refer to a forest, a pasturage or a group of châlets. All distances are given in time, which is vague at best, and may differ radically as between a Swiss cowherd in training and two American women with a small boy.

An unusually clear-spoken and intelligent native might discourse as follows: “In a quarter of an hour you will be at Hinter der Egg. Do not turn off to the right at Eggboden. Cross the Gundelgraben and continue down for an hour through the Raufte. When you reach Geyscheur you will see two paths. You may take either. Both lead to Grund. You are two and a half hours from Grindelwald.” Usually, it is much more involved. And remember that you are hearing everyone of those blessed names for the first time. Two turn out to be cheese huts, one a stream, one a meadow, one a group of three or four dwelling-houses, and the last the bottom of the slope where the Lütschine runs through. But you don’t learn that from the man who is giving you directions.

I never knew such a long seven miles. It seemed as if Grindelwald receded as fast as we advanced. We tore along the last part of the time, each taking a hand of the Babe, almost running, to keep the night from catching us on the mountain-side. It was nearly dark before we got home, but as the last part of our way was over the familiar highroad, it did not matter. The Châlet Edelweiss looked like a terrestrial paradise, and never was there a sensation more luxurious than shedding our wet, muddy clothes in favor of peignoirs and putting our tired feet into bedroom slippers, unless it was furnished by the good hot dinner that followed.

The other Männlichen trip was vastly different. The day was clear as a bell—radiant, perfect. We walked down to the Grund station and took the train as far as Alpiglen only, about half way to the Scheidegg. You see we were learning to climb by then. We took a lovely (though sometimes unfindable) cross-slanting path from there to the Männlichen, and all the way kept opening up more and more glorious vistas. Starting with a backward look into the Grindelwald Valley and at our own Wetterhorn and Eiger, we uncovered the Mönch first and then the Jungfrau, with her beautiful shining sub-peaks, the Silberhorn and Schneehorn, and finally, when we got to the top of the ridge, there was that surprising hole in the ground, the Lauterbrunnen Valley, with all its waterfalls tumbling down the rock walls of the opposite side. Beyond were more snow mountains and to the westward Lake Thun and Lake Brienz, Interlaken and more snow mountains. I do truly think the view from the Männlichen is the finest in Switzerland, if not in the whole world. The view from the Gornergrat is a wilderness of glaciers, utterly magnificent, but lacking in variety. The view from the Rigi is a panorama of distant objects and lacks the stupendous foreground supplied for the Männlichen by that trio of colossi, Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau.

Our sandwiches and cake were a feast of the gods that day, with heaven and earth spread out above, below and all around us—green in the valley, white on the mountains, blue overhead. We came home by the path we had followed so sloppily and doubtfully that other day and found it perfectly plain, much shorter and wonderfully transformed as to looks. I remember that we carried home armloads of Alpenroses gathered on the higher slopes.

Of our tramp to the Grosse Scheidegg, the most striking feature was the attack of “mountain sickness” Belle Soeur had just before reaching the summit. It is an unpleasant sort of thing consisting of palpitation of the heart, faintness, nausea, and turning a greenish white. The proper treatment is to lie down till it passes off and take some cognac. We hadn’t any cognac along that day, so poor Belle Soeur could only lie down and wait till it got ready to go away. The Scheidegg is only 6400 feet high. She never felt it again at any such level as that, but encountered it on the Gries Pass at about 8000 feet and going over the Strahlegg at somewhere near 10,000. We always made a practice after the first time of carrying a small cognac flask along whenever we were making an ascent.

The view from the Scheidegg is interesting, but not at all in the same class as the Männlichen outlook.

We came home by way of the Grindel Alp pastures and encountered great herds of cattle, and wondered whether it was our duty to be afraid of them, but decided it wasn’t. We lost our path and tried to cut across the meadows without one. It looked very easy. We could see the roof of our own house plainly several miles distant, but the streams we had to cross, which ran often through deep ravines, made it hard and sometimes a little risky. There was one beautiful spot on a crag overhanging a stream where we fully intended to return some day to picnic, but we never could find it again!

That was the day we learned the wonderfully resting effect on tired and swollen feet of bathing them in the ice-cold water of a mountain stream.

In those early days, before the Transatlantics arrived, the Chronicler used to put in several hours a day in the polishing of her new novel, the Elder Babe used to have lessons, Belle Soeur had an attack of sewing and turned out wonderful confections for her wardrobe, and we all improved our minds with Swiss history. I say “improved our minds” advisedly, for it certainly did not amuse us. Why is it that, with all the dramatic material at hand, some one doesn’t write a history of Switzerland that the ordinary reader can peruse without going to sleep? Something must be allowed of course for the fact that we were not living in the history-hallowed part of Switzerland. Nothing ever happened in the Grindelwald Valley except a battle in 1191, between the Duke of Zaeringen and some recalcitrant nobles who did not like his populistic tendencies. The Duke won the battle and straightway founded Berne and endowed its burghers with all sorts of privileges, the more to annoy the nobles. Or perhaps his motives were really high and altruistic and he would have been glad if he could have foreseen that the Bernese burghers would eventually down nobles and sovereign too. But I really don’t think that we were so lacking in imagination that we could not have been interested in the doings of the Eidgenossen in the Forest Cantons, over the Brünig to the eastward, only a few miles after all, if the histories, French and English alike, had not been so deadly dull.

It is not only the histories either. There is something very unsatisfactory about all the literature concerning Switzerland. Much of it is painstakingly constructed out of guide-books like Rollo’s Adventures. Some of the things that are best as literature were written by men who got their impressions at second hand. Schiller wrote Tell and Scott wrote Anne of Geierstein without ever having set foot on Swiss soil. The Swissness of both reminds one of Dr. Johnson’s remark about women’s writing poetry and dogs walking on their hind legs. It is not to be expected that they should do it well, but the surprising thing is that they should be able to do it at all!

Now Byron did live up at Wengern Alp just over the Kleine Scheidegg while he was writing Manfred, and the other day I read it over, anticipating much. Time was when I thought Manfred one of the greatest dramatic poems ever written. It gave me all sort of thrills and creeps. But this rereading was a grievous disappointment. There are a few fine lines, but most of the descriptions are cheap, tawdry and conventional, fit accompaniments to a third-rate melodramatic attempt at clothing in false sentiment a theme essentially rotten.

Hyperion is another old-time favorite that I have just reread with a chill of disappointment. The dear poet was obviously bored by a solitary tramp he took to the Grimsel. He got the blues in Interlaken when it rained (which was not surprising), he saw the Jungfrau from the hotel piazza, took a drive to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, and for the rest had no eyes for anything except that uninteresting girl, Mary Ashburton. The Swiss color of it all is distinctly thin.

The tales of high climbing are often thrilling as adventures, but are usually written by people who don’t know how to write. And one who has not been bitten by the Alpinist mania can not help feeling that so much daring and energy might have been better expended than in breaking records and necks. It is really a species of insanity, this high-climbing passion. The world and its standards must be curiously out of focus to its victims. They don’t even pay any attention to scenery. Much of their climbing is done in the dark (between two A. M. and day-break) and they are always too pressed for time to stop to look at a view, their brief rests being scientifically calculated to restore their exhausted mind and muscles. Tyndall’s books are extremely satisfactory in their way. He was an enthusiastic climber, without being a crank on the subject, had a scientific object in his trips and a considerable literary gift in describing them.

In general, I suppose it is true that where nature is so overpoweringly magnificent, art is dwarfed. Those who deeply feel the sublimity of it all hold their peace, and it is only the superficial who go home and slop over in printed twaddle. Of whose number the present Chronicler, thus self-confessedly, is one.

V

On the epoch-making twenty-first day of July, Frater and Antonio tramped into our lives with knapsacks on their backs. We were not expecting them till the next day. Frater had written from somewhere up the Rhine that they would strike us about the 22nd. In a small parenthesis he had added that they might arrive by the 21st, but Frater’s hand-writing, being of the kind sacred to genius, I had not read this part. They had come up on the train from Interlaken, but of course we had not met them at the station, and no one could tell them where we lived. They wandered out the highroad to the Upper Glacier, and as it appeared quite evident we did not live on the ice-fall or the Wetterhorn cliffs, they turned back again. Some one told them our châlet was on the mountain-side, and they started up a path, but met a peasant of whom they inquired again. This individual, after stroking his chin in silent rumination for some time, suddenly shot out his forefinger in the direction of the Châlet Edelweiss and said “Dort!” with such convincing emphasis that they started down again across the fields. Thus it happened that our first glimpse of them was from a most unexpected direction, dropping out of the clouds as it were, or, to be accurate, climbing over one of the rare fences behind and above us. We were not sure of their identity at first, but the long legs and Cornell sweaters looked familiar, and Belle Soeur on the balcony ventured to wave a greeting which was enthusiastically returned.

We had been just about sitting down to tea, and I remember the singular inadequacy of the biscuit supply. Retiring to the kitchen I hastily sent off Anna to the village for more of everything for dinner, and it was well that I did so. I had been catering for a family of women and children so long that it took some days to get adjusted to the new circumstances, and we were perpetually running up against unexpected vacuums. Anna and Suzanne were as much distressed over the increased expenditures as if they had been personally footing the bills and often cut us short on things that we really had plenty of just from their instinct of thriftiness.

We spent the four intervening days before the Mother’s arrival in showing the boys the immediate neighborhood of Grindelwald. They were still a little quiet and shy, especially Antonio, and the process of transforming the Young Ladies’ Boarding School into the Private Lunatic Asylum was not yet in visible operation.

The Mother had been entirely explicit as to the time of her arrival, and we walked down to Interlaken to meet her—Belle Soeur, Frater, Antonio, the Elder Babe and I. It was fourteen miles, and although it was down grade on a fine highroad, as we had to arrive at noon, we made an early start. Even so, we had to move at so lively a pace that the poor Babe with his short legs was kept on a trot. The Babe, however, is game, and he had no notion in the world of letting his grandmother arrive, unmet by him.

We lined up on the pier, dusty and thirsty, a bare five minutes ahead of the Lake Brienz steamer——. There it comes, puffing along, tourists thronging the decks! Where is she? Has she missed connections after all? If we have come all this way, and she isn’t there—Ah! But she is there!

It is Antonio who has spied her. Wildly waving their hats, he and Frater lift up the strains of the Aguinaldo chorus:

“Well, am I the boss or am I the show?

Am I the Governor General or a ho-o-bo?

Well, I’d like to know

Who’s arunning this show!

Is it me or Emilio Aguinaldo?”

It was the first time Belle Soeur and I had heard this beautiful ditty, as we had been out of the country for a year or more. I think it must have been the first time the people on the wharf and steamer had heard it, too, for they looked at the stalwart performers in some surprise. But the Mother, who had spent the previous winter in Ithaca and helped the boys graduate the month before, was thoroughly accustomed to it and would doubtless have had her feelings hurt if she had been greeted in any other way.

It was at this point that Frater committed the crime of lèse majesté, infanticide and arson all rolled into one. As the little steamer came up near the wharf he stepped across the foot or so of intervening water onto the lower deck with the sinful intention of greeting his mother two minutes sooner and carrying her satchel ashore. As his foot touched the deck, he was seized by two employees of the steamer in a state of excitement bordering on apoplexy. It was against the rules—against all the rules! No one was allowed on the steamer until all the passengers had come ashore by the gang-plank. “Oh, all right,” said Frater good-naturedly, “I’ll go back on the wharf if it worries you,” and he started to step back. At that they became still more excited and held him tighter than ever. That also was against the rules. No one could go ashore except over the gang-plank. Also nobody could go ashore without giving up his ticket. Frater had no ticket, of course. What were they going to do about it? They did not know. They would see. Such an emergency had never occurred before and there were no precedents. He was to wait till all the passengers had gone off, and then they would decide. All this was said in wild and very imperfectly comprehended German. There was no one around who spoke either French or English. Frater had joined the Mother, who waited with him for the passengers to go ashore, in some perturbation of spirit as to what was to be done to her son. Of course nothing was done. They walked ashore after the others. But the double line of uniformed employees through whom they passed were still barely able to repress their excitement, and their lowering brows would have struck terror to more timorous hearts. It was really as though some form of sacrilege had been committed, which they had decided to overlook in the interests of international comity. This was the only time we ever ran up against any of the Powers that Be in our wanderings, which, everything considered, was, I think, doing uncommonly well.

Frater and the Mother being safely restored to us, the late exciting incident became one thing more to laugh about, and it was a very merry party who sat down to eat a picnic lunch in a secluded spot beside the Aar, and washed it down, subsequently, with Munich beer on draft at a near-by out-door restaurant, and caught the Grindelwald train, and were met at the station by Suzanne and the Younger Babe, running down the road hand in hand, a trifle late and greatly out of breath. The Mother, her baggage, and the Babes were piled into the Red-headed Man’s carriage, and the rest of us marched behind singing the Aguinaldo chorus. You see we were already beginning to thaw out. The Chronicler, no longer Senior Officer Present, felt that her extreme dignity could now be safely relaxed. Frater never was very shy, and Antonio was getting acquainted.

I think, at the risk of being considered a gossip, I shall have to tell how those two young men got to us, because it was so thoroughly characteristic. They hadn’t either of them the money to spend on a European trip and had intended going to work at their respective professions of electrical and mechanical engineering as soon as they left college: but what I had written of our location in Switzerland, the Mother’s intention of spending the summer with us, and my entirely sincere, but also entirely unexpecting suggestion that they should “come along too” set them to thinking and planning. They went down to New York, shipped on a cattle steamer and worked their way to Antwerp, walked across Belgium, came up the Rhine by boat (third class) and across by rail, also third class, from Basel. It had taken them about a month from New York, and they had seen a great many interesting things and places and had spent, as I remember, in the neighborhood of twenty dollars apiece!

VI

The next week was devoted to introducing the Mother to her new surroundings. Our trips were limited by her tendency to get asthma when climbing and her inability to go anywhere near the edge of a precipice. Even when the path was several feet wide, as on the way to the Bäregg, the consciousness of a down-drop made her “dizzy in the knees.” But there were plenty of beautiful walks to take within these limits. And her enthusiasm over the life and the land would have inspired the rest of us if we had not been already profoundly convinced of the blessedness of our lot.

We did one thing during this interval which I don’t doubt would brand us as proper inmates for a lunatic asylum in the esteem of all the good respectable conventional people in the world. We spent a night on the Männlichen rolled up in steamer rugs watching the moon! Frater proposed it first to me. He and I have a fondness for the Voices of the Night and have roughed it enough together to know we can sleep on the ground now and then without catching cold or feeling cross next morning. Belle Soeur and Antonio decided that they wanted to come too, and the noble spirit in which they bore the hardships of the occasion proved that they were qualified for admission to the Inner Circle.

We left in the afternoon, a little later than we should have done, for we were rather heavily loaded down with jackets and rugs and our prospective supper, and we were going all the way on foot this time by the direct Männlichen path, which we had only come down before, and it takes longer to go up than to come down! However, by pressing our steps to a slightly uncomfortable degree, we got to the summit just in time for sunset.

The scene of the next few minutes before the blood red had faded from the west, is one of the pictures indelibly burned into my memory. We stood there silently drinking it in, the boys for the first time, Belle Soeur and I loving it the more for having known it before. For a while we watched the details blurring under the on-stealing twilight. Then hunger asserted itself, and we found a place below the summit, somewhat sheltered from the biting winds, where we perched ourselves on a ridge like crows and did ample justice to the contents of the paper parcels that the boys drew from their knapsacks.

Then it occurred to us that we had better use the small remaining aftermath of daylight to find some spots sheltered from the wind and level enough to sleep on. It seems absurd to say that on the whole mountain-side there was no place level enough to lie down on without slipping off. Yet it was very nearly true. The summit was swept by a blast of icy wind. The snow-drifts had disappeared since we were there a month before, but it was still very cold after the warming sun had retired for the night. On the Lauterbrunnen side there was just plain precipice, on the Grindelwald side a very steep descent divided between stones and grass. After much searching we established ourselves on a little shelf, barely wide enough for a person to lie on and sloping down just enough for one to feel as if one was about to roll off. There was nothing to hold on to, so we dug our feet into the ground in a more or less futile attempt to secure what Frater described as a “toe-grip.” There was a low growth of thistles in our neighborhood, too, which drove their prickles through our steamer rugs in a rather unpleasant fashion.

Soon the weather began to behave badly. Great banks of clouds came up out of the depths and covered the region where the moon was due to rise. The stars twinkled brightly overhead, but, barring a sudden change in cloud conditions, it was evident that no moon would be visible before the middle of the night. We hoped against hope so long as we could, keeping up a desultory talk and a little soft-pedal singing. Then each rolled up in his or her steamer rug, sought six feet of shelf room, and—eventually—fell asleep.

I was awakened by a very penetrating chill in the marrow of my spinal column, and opening my eyes, saw that there was a dim pale radiance over the universe that had been lacking when I went to sleep. I spoke very low. Frater answered. We crawled out of our rugs and clambered up to the Männlichen summit.

I wonder if human eyes ever rested on a scene of more eerie loveliness? The moon struggled through and upward at last into the open sky, and the clouds broke away enough so that great masses of the Eiger-Mönch-Jungfrau group came into sight, looking even more stupendously huge from being partly hidden. The valleys seemed bottomless abysses—their floors four thousand feet below being utterly lost in blackness. And on the other side of the Lauterbrunnen Valley the billowy snow peaks, quite free from clouds, rolled away, all silver in the moonlight.

What a scene for some stupendous cosmic drama with spirits of the earth and air for actors! How did we dare to intrude on their vigils—mere prying interlopers that we were?

Every once in a while we had to stamp around violently and swing our arms to get warm. Otherwise we sat quite still and almost silent, feeling the way one ought to feel in church, but mostly doesn’t.

At last the clouds caught up with the moon and hid it, and we stumbled sleepily down and found our rugs and sections of ledge again.

Just before sunrise it was Antonio who was awake and ready to accompany me to the summit. The others were sleeping the sleep of the just and declined to be aroused. It was wonderfully beautiful again—the rebirth of the hidden world, the mountains thrusting up their mighty shoulders above the foamy cloud-sea that filled the valleys into the faint pink glow which was gone almost as soon as seen. As soon as the glamour of the sunrise had faded we knew that we were ravenously hungry, and shaking the sleepers into a similar conviction, we started for the Männlichen Inn and hot coffee and rolls and honey.

I do not know where the people at the Inn supposed we had dropped from at that hour. No questions were asked and no information volunteered. The breakfast was excellent and we set out for home much refreshed. Little by little, as we walked, our cramped muscles limbered and our chilled blood warmed—warmed too much, in fact, before we reached the Châlet at midday with those ton-a-piece steamer rugs over our shoulders.

Mönch and Jungfrau from the Männlichen

The moon had not done all we had expected of it. But we felt it was proved that the quartette was of the “right stuff” and could safely venture on a fortnight’s pedestrian trip.

VII

The morning we started out on our first memorable pedestrian tour, the Mother and the Elder Babe accompanied us to where the Grosse Scheidegg path turns off from the highroad, Suzanne, Anna and the Younger Babe having previously waved us out of sight from the balcony of the Châlet.

I felt some qualms of prospective homesickness as I left them and a twinge of conscience lest one of the Babes might get sick or the Mother have trouble with the housekeeping, but by the time we had dropped over on the other side of the Scheidegg ridge and could no longer see the red roof of our Châlet, I had lost my misgivings and began to enjoy my vacation. I had not felt so completely free from the harness for Heaven knows how long, and as I walked along I could feel the years sliding off of me and hear them thud as they struck the ground. I think I must have halted somewhere about the sixteen-year-old point. That’s the way I felt, at least. And it is an interesting fact that I was addressed uniformly as Fräulein or Mademoiselle by strangers all the rest of the season. The short skirt may have had something to do with it, but the Swiss are entirely used to even elderly ladies in short dresses.

Perhaps our outfit may be of some interest. My own skirt and jacket were of corduroy, and I don’t think the material could be improved upon. Nothing else will stand so much sun and rain and dust and mud and still look decent. With this, downward, gaiters of the same and heavy-soled hob-nailed boots. Upward, a dark linen shirt waist and a feather-weight Swiss straw hat, with a brim broad enough to protect from the sun. One should have the trimmings of one’s hat of a warranted-fast color. I did not and suffered accordingly. The hat I started out with was trimmed with a garland of red poppies, and the effect of the first heavy rain was fearful and wonderful to behold. The next was trimmed with ribbon and suffered almost as badly. The third was adorned with a Scotch plaid that really rose superior to weather.

The boys made no special preparation for the trip except to have the soles of their boots well studded with nails and to invest each in a soft felt Swiss hat, warranted to stand any weather, and to stick fast in any wind. Each of us had strapped over the shoulders a light canvas Rückensack, containing the absolutely essential (reduced to the last irreducible minimum) for a week. We had planned to have clean clothes meet us by mail at Zermatt at the end of that time. The Swiss mailing arrangements are ideal, and one can send a good-sized hamper anywhere for a few cents. In the same manner we got rid of our soiled clothes by mailing them home. Belle Soeur and I carried alpenstocks, having found them a real help in climbing steep paths and even more so in coming down. The boys despised them as tourist-like and amateurish and would have nothing to do with them. When we took off our jackets we put them through the straps across our shoulders so that our hands (barring the friendly alpenstocks) were always free. We didn’t bother with umbrellas or raincoats, none of us being liable to colds.

We ate our luncheon soon after we dropped over the Scheidegg into the Rosenlaui Valley. The character of the landscape had changed already. We sat on a slope adorned by a group of Christmas trees and a highly decorative herd of cattle and saw our old friend the Wetterhorn in an entirely unfamiliar shape and looked with interest at the queer rock wings of the Engelhörner.

Having consumed our last reminder of Home and Mother, we pushed on, presently finding ourselves racing for the Rosenlaui hotel against up-piling clouds that obviously held rain. The clouds beat, but we got there in time to save ourselves from an absolute drenching and sat in a summer-house for some time, drinking a form of fizzy water which had evidently (from its price) been diluted with liquid gold.

If a baptism of fire is the critical moment in the life of a young soldier, I take it that the baptism of rain is the touchstone for the inexperienced pedestrian. If you preserve the Smile-that-won’t-come-off when your shoes are soaked through and the water goes chunk-chunk inside of them, and the mud clings to the outside, and the rain trickles down your neck—inside the collar, and your wet skirts flap about your ankles (if you’re a man you’re spared that), and the thick clouds shut out all the mountains you came to see,—why then you’ve won your spurs.

When the serious part of the rain was over and we felt that we could afford no more gold-flavored Apollinaris and had no other excuse for lingering, we continued down that water-logged valley. Frater and I kept up our spirits by singing everything we knew, from Suwannee River to Anheuser Busch, but it really wasn’t fair, because Antonio has a musical ear and must have suffered a lot. We saw some waterfalls, but were too wet ourselves to be much cheered by them.

We did get some amusement, though, out of a solitary French pedestrian who asked us if we had encountered any rain. The question was so absurdly superfluous in view of the rain-soaked condition of ourselves and the whole world, that we made him repeat it several times before we gave him a grave and final affirmative. I think he felt lonely and thought he would like to join our party, but we choked off his little attempts at conversation and shook him without compunction. One has to draw the line somewhere, and we drew it at making acquaintances with any one except the native peasants, and they usually drew the line on us!

Emerging into the Meiringen Valley into which the Rosenlaui opens, we quickly decided against Meiringen as too large and sophisticated a place to be interesting, and, moreover, several miles out of our way. There was a village almost straight in front of us which rejoiced in two names, Innertkirchen and Imhof. This was unfortunate, as whatever native we asked the road of always seemed to know it only by the other name. It proved an elusive place. We took the wrong turn several times, and it was beginning to get dark, and it was a long time since lunch, and this was our first night as tramps.

We were not made happier by catching up with the principal inn at last and finding it full. The other one, on the extreme edge of the village, seemed hardly more promising at first, for the landlady said she had just two rooms left, one with one bed and the other with three. However, a little persuasion reminded her that there was another little single room in the third story, if one of the young gentlemen didn’t mind. We were not disposed to be critical. They matched pennies for it, and Antonio was relegated to the loft.

This inn, with the all-but-universal name of Alpenrose, proved a good specimen of the plain, clean, honest and inexpensive Swiss type. We encountered for the first time a system of two-priced table d’hôte, of which we were given our choice, the difference being not in the quality of the food, but in the number of courses. Thus: Will you have soup and one kind of meat with vegetables, followed by fruit, at one franc fifty, or soup, two kinds of meat with vegetables, and salad before the fruit, at two fifty? We chose the cheaper and had plenty, in spite of our fine appetites. Belle Soeur and I were also indulging in one-franc-fifty lodgings for the first time. The boys knew all about them from their experience between Antwerp and Grindelwald.

The dining-room had various Schützenfest prizes hung up around the walls, and we had our ideas of these functions broadened and our appreciation of our own Herr Secundärlehrer’s first prize achievement quickened, when we found that one was labeled the fifty-seventh and another the eighty-first prize!

When we emerged on the dusky balcony after dinner, two mysterious figures were sitting there whom we took to be nuns in some form of religious habit. This theory was shaken when we observed a lighted pipe in the mouth of one, and closer scrutiny developed a moustache on the upper lip of the other. We finally learned from the hotel register that they were German students on a pedestrian trip, the nun-like effect being given by voluminous cloaks with peaked hoods drawn over their heads. They must have been joyous things to carry on a walking trip—worse than the steamer rugs we dragged up the Männlichen!

To our surprise, as soon as it was dark, bonfires began to break forth from surrounding mountain-tops. We asked if this illumination was the regular thing in the Meiringen Valley and learned that the first of August is the Swiss form of Fourth of July and that they were celebrating the oath of the Eidgenossen on the heights of Rütli. They were doing the same thing in Grindelwald and indeed all over the republic.

We wandered into the village to see if any other form of celebration was going on, but it was all as quiet as a Presbyterian Sunday. The only noisy thing we could find was the “Infant Aar” brawling foamily down under a covered wooden bridge. We hung over its parapets for some time, listening to the racket it made and watching the blazing fires along the mountain-tops, while Belle Soeur and I tried to impart such knowledge as we had been able to gather concerning the worthy representatives of the Forest Cantons, Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden, who bound themselves by oath somewhere back in the twelve hundreds, to drive out the Austrians and make their country free. Frater and Antonio did not mind being told, in small doses, but after a brief glance at our improving assortment of Swiss histories, they had politely and firmly declined to read them.

VIII

Our second day’s tramp was perhaps the severest test we met of temper and endurance. We had purposely planned for an easy day—about fourteen miles by excellent highroad (a diligence route) to the Grimsel Hospice. We had four thousand feet to climb, but distributed over fourteen miles of carefully graded road, this was not very terrifying. It was a test only because we had not yet shaken down into the habit of continuous tramping. At Grindelwald, after an all-day’s walk, we always rested the next day. So we got up feeling loggy and lazy, muscles still tired and feet a bit sore. And the situation was made worse by the weather. We had a series of showers to contend against with clouds between whiles.

The rain is the worst thing about Switzerland. Of course if there was not so much of it, the valleys and lower slopes would not be so beautifully green. And sometimes there are several weeks of unbroken sunshine when one feels promoted to Heaven ahead of time. But, on the other hand, one has sometimes a straight fortnight of rain, unspeakably depressing, roads afloat with mud and all the mountains shut out from view. Even the on-and-off showers are trying and apt to trail a skyful of clouds before and after them.

On leaving Imhof we invested in bread, cheese, and chocolate for luncheon (the only articles of food the village store afforded) and started lazily up the Hasli valley. Everybody passed us, but we didn’t care. We were not making records and had plenty of time. It is a narrow valley, pretty rather than imposing, with the Infant Aar running down the bottom of it and the road occupying a ledge just above. Baedeker calls it the Infant Aar. It is so seldom that matter-of-fact condenser of useful information indulges in descriptive epithets that his occasional poetic flights always filled us with joy, and none of us, I am sure, will ever think of the tempestuous mountain torrent we followed all that day upwards towards its cradle, except as the Infant Aar.

We took refuge during one shower under a ledge of rock and were lucky enough to strike a roadside refreshment house for another, where we regaled ourselves with hot milk—a surprisingly restful and thirst-quenching beverage when one is “on the road,” and, in Switzerland, almost invariably good.

We discovered a lovely bosky spot for our luncheon, where the valley floor spread out a bit and the Infant split itself into streamlets, forming little wooded, ferny, rocky islets. A profusion of huckleberries were growing in this sequestered region, and we found they made an excellent dessert (though somewhat soured by the rain) after our dry and not too substantial luncheon.

It was here that we lost Antonio. He wandered off with his camera while we were resting after luncheon and did not come back. We called him and hunted for him till Frater said he must have gone on ahead and would doubtless be waiting for us at the next turn of the road. He knew Antonio better than the rest of us did, and claimed that this would be a highly characteristic procedure—that it would never occur to him we did not know where he was. So we went on with rather forced cheerfulness. I confess to feeling uneasy. The Aar was a lusty and distinctly rapid Infant, and if, in jumping across to one of those islets to take a picture, he had lost his footing?——Frater jeered at my forebodings and brazenly took a photograph of our late picnic grounds, labeling it “last place where Antonio was seen alive” and saying I could send it to his mother. But Antonio was not at the first turn of the road nor the next, nor the next, and we sat down to take counsel.

We were engaged in a mournfully jocular manner in composing a letter to his family to announce his mysterious disappearance, when we heard a delightfully unghostlike halloa from the road behind us, and presently the strayed lamb came into sight. He had actually fallen asleep among the huckleberry bushes which had concealed him from our view, and had not heard us call him, but having found the note we left among the cheese rinds (we always left notes for each other when separated) he had started along at a rapid gait to overtake us—and he would never have dreamed of such a thing as going ahead without telling us.... It’s all well that ends well, and the reunited family proceeded happily.

The Handegg Falls were the chief incident of the afternoon. A person familiar with Niagara and Yosemite is not going to burst his heart with rapture over any of the Swiss waterfalls. Some are beautiful, some are wild, but all are on a small scale.

The Handegg, though, is among the most satisfactory. The Infant Aar furnishes a respectable volume of water and takes a plunge here of two hundred and forty feet. Moreover, there is an admirable place to view it from, an overhanging ledge on a level with the top of the falls. And the rainbow in the spray is charming.

Along about sunset, after we had risen above timber line, we came upon a tiny road-house kept by an old man and his daughter. Here, on a little table just outside the door we decided to take our supper of what the house afforded—hot milk, bread and soft-boiled eggs. We absorbed large quantities of this simple but nourishing fare, moved our chairs inside when the rain began, and tried to persuade our hosts to put us up for the night. They had absolutely no sleeping accommodations, however, except for themselves, so perforce, when the rain let up, we continued along the chilly, desolate and rapidly darkening road to the Grimsel Hospice.

That is surely one of the barrenest spots on God’s earth. There is a bowl-shaped hollow full of stones. There is a lake at the bottom, when we first saw it, inky black. There is a one-story building whose stone walls, some three feet thick, were built to withstand winter storms. This used to be a hospice kept for travelers by monks like the famous one of St. Bernard, but now it its a hotel run for profit and patronized by Alpinists and passing tourists. The snow peaks rise up all around the bowl, and Finsteraarhorn, the highest mountain of the Oberland, dwarfed from Grindelwald by nearer giants, here shows up more nearly in its true proportions. But Finsteraarhorn is really a climber’s peak, and we were not to know it intimately till much later.

Grimsel Hospice

Our three-franc-apiece sleeping accommodations seemed quite sophisticated after the one-fifty lodgings of the night before, and the reading-room in which we gathered to discuss maps and plans for the morrow, quite a model of luxury. We wrote some letters, too, not knowing when we should have so good a chance again. It was quite a cosmopolitan bunch of envelopes we put into the mail-box—one for the Mother in Grindelwald, of course, one to the Husband in the Philippines, two or three addressed to the United States, and one to Antonio’s parents in Brazil.

Have I mentioned that Antonio is a Brazilian? He is not, however, the undiluted article. He had an English grandfather who transmitted to his descendant quite a number of easily recognizable Anglo-Saxon traits.

In case he should take exception to my manner of stating this, let me tell him a little parable. One summer when I was in Korea I met a native woman at the home of a missionary. We were not able to talk with each other except through our interpreter, but we had quite a friendly time smiling, and after she had left, the missionary said to me, “She thinks you are perfectly charming. She says if it wasn’t for the clothes, you would look exactly like a Korean.” Now, I had never been conscious of any special yearning to look like a Korean, but I considered the source of the remark and decided it was one of the most thoroughgoing compliments I had ever received!

The gods were good to us next day. There was not a cloud in the sky and the air was like champagne. Our muscles had become disciplined, our languor was shaken off. After an excellent breakfast of coffee, rolls and honey, we started out gayly from the grim stone hospice that had lodged us, past the twin lakes, blue as sapphires in the bottom of a cold gray cup, and up the steep footpath that cuts off the long loops of the diligence road.

The summit of the pass, just a little over seven thousand feet high, was soon reached, and we paused to get our bearings and enjoy the view. We were on the boundary between Canton Berne and the Valais, between Protestant and Catholic Switzerland. But the difference between the two is more than theological. Berne, founded by a prince to stand for freedom, proud and prosperous from the start, one of the first to join the Forest Cantons in their Confederation, typifies all that is sturdy and successful in Switzerland. Poor Valais, on the other hand, crushed under the heel of Savoie and harassed by petty local lordlings, passed through centuries of civil war and uprisings in the struggle for liberty, and when at last snatched from her oppressors and joined to the Swiss Bund, it was in the poor-relation capacity of “subject canton.” It is only in recent years that this humiliation has been removed. The effects still show. All we saw of Valais seemed poorer, dirtier, less intelligent and enterprising than the canton we had left.

These peculiarities were not, however, visible from the top of the pass. We gazed first of all at the huge Rhone glacier, from which the river takes its rise—vast, dirty, ungainly, not to be compared in picturesqueness with our Grindelwald glaciers. We saw the river meandering away down the valley, the chains of snow mountains on the other side, and the zigzag road from the opposite bank of the glacier over the Furka Pass, which we were to travel later in the season. Near at hand was the somber little Lake of the Dead, so called from the number of bodies thrown into it after the fight between the Austrians and French in 1799.

With an affectionate backward glance at Finsteraarhorn and all the other Bernese snow peaks we were leaving, we plunged down the steep incline into the Rhone valley. The hotel is at the juncture of three great diligence routes—those of the Furka, the Grimsel, and the Rhone valley. We found ourselves in a whirl of arriving and departing tourists and had a sophisticated lunch in their midst, then shook the dust of Philistia from our feet and resumed our staffs and knapsacks. We had been up to the foot of the glacier before luncheon, scorned its bareness and dirt and haughtily declined the invitations of the ice-grotto man, and we were now free to continue our way down the valley.

A few turns of the road restored us to our lost Arcadia. The first few miles of the road led through a wild and picturesque region, with woods and ravines, and the Infant Rhone brawling as loudly at the Infant Aar had done the day before. But this infant was pursuing a steep-grade downward path, and before long we found ourselves in a flat open valley, full of cultivated fields and villages, distinctly warm in the mid-afternoon sunshine and growing more so. The infant had become quiet to the verge of placidity. It might almost have been a canal. The mountain ridges along each side of the valley were, comparatively speaking, tame. We had intended keeping on down the valley to Brieg, where the railroad begins, but we began to chafe at the thought of thirty-one miles of this.

The village of Oberwald impressed itself on my memory for several things. First, for the turnip-shaped, almost Mohammedan-looking spire on its church, which we found to be typical of this end of the valley. Next for the extreme difficulty with which we purchased the simple substance of our supper, which we intended to take al fresco an hour or so later. There seemed to be no provision stores at all. After looking all around we made inquiries and were directed to a house which seemed to be merely a dwelling. No one was in sight, nor was there anything to indicate mercantile pursuits. We opened the door and found ourselves in an ill-lighted, ill-kept hallway. The nearest door, on investigation, proved to open into an almost dark room, where a deaf old woman rather unwillingly sold us some hard bread and a big slice of cheese.

The third thing for which, not only I, but all of us, remember Oberwald was the liter of white wine purchased there. We were very, very thirsty by now, and of course one cannot drink water in any of these places without serious risk. The little diligence refreshment place had no mineral waters, and we had left the region of milk. So we took white wine—just a liter—one franc’s worth—between four of us. It doesn’t sound very desperate. It was thin and sour and cool and thirst-quenching. We each drank our glass down rapidly and continued our walk.

Soon I began to feel strange sensations—a sort of lightness in the head and far-awayness of the landscape, a severing of connections with my feet and uncertainty as to whether they would continue to walk or in what direction. We compared notes. The others were feeling similar symptoms—some more, some less. It was rather absurd and distinctly mortifying. We wondered if we “showed it.” Fortunately we were not likely to meet anyone who would be interested. We adjured each other to “keep going” and “walk it off.” I shall never forget the agonized tone of Antonio’s voice as he begged, “Give me a hunk of that cheese—quick!—Don’t stop—keep moving. Maybe it won’t be so bad when my stomach isn’t empty.” Even at the time, though, we were aware of the humorous aspect presented by four individuals of irreproachable antecedents, some of whom were feeling the effects of alcohol for the first time in their lives, tearing at a mad pace down the Rhone valley, in constant terror of their own legs, and convinced that if they paused for a moment they would fall into a stupor by the wayside!

The treatment (whether usual or not, I don’t pretend to know) proved efficacious, and we gradually returned to our normal condition. The highroad presenting no attractive site for supper, we cut across a field or so to the river and sat down under a fringe of trees on its bank. Here, as soon as the bread and cheese were disposed of, we got out Baedeker and the maps and held a council. It was soon decided to abandon the uninteresting Rhone valley, take a dip into Italy, and arrive at Brieg by two sides of the triangle instead of one. It would require two extra days, but we were no slaves to a schedule. We would go over the little-traveled Gries Pass, see the Tosa falls, travel down the Val Formazza to its joining with the Simplon road, then back by that famous pass into Switzerland.

I don’t know that I ever experienced the gypsy feeling more deliciously than during that half-hour while, stretched out on the grass by the babbling Infant Rhone, we discussed this impromptu excursion into another country which no one but the Chronicler had ever visited before! What light-hearted, irresponsible vagabonds we were!

The lengthening shadows warned us to be up and moving toward Ulrichen, which was at once the first village where we could obtain shelter for the night and the nearest to the Gries Pass.

Here it seemed as if our good luck was about to desert us, for the solitary inn was full to overflowing, and we were told we must go on to the next village. The landlady looked amiable, though, and we tried the effect of persuasion. We were tired—very tired. We had been walking since early morning. And it was already dark. Perhaps we would find no room at Geschenen and would have to go all the way to Münster. We were going over the Gries the following day—a long day’s walk at best, and the added distance back from Münster, or even Geschenen, would be a real hardship. Surely there was some way? We would be content with the simplest accommodations. Wasn’t there someone in the village who would rent us two rooms for the night, if they absolutely could make no place for us at the hotel? Finally, the good woman weakened. We could come in and sit down and she would find us something, somewhere. In the meantime did we wish any refreshments? Bent on abstemiousness, we ordered hot milk—but plenty of it!

Along about half-past nine, when the other guests had all been tucked away out of sight, and we were nearly dropping asleep in our chairs, the landlady and two maid servants bearing candles came to conduct us to our lodgings. I should hate to have to find that place again. It seemed miles away and through impenetrable shadows. We found the man and woman of the house sitting up with a candle to greet us and apologize for the poorness of the accommodations. Then we picked our way up a rickety outside staircase and were ushered into the two rooms which were to be ours. We had been told there was only one bed in each room, but that they were large ones, very large, and we had visions of four-posters. We found just the ordinary single bed. However, it was quite too late to go elsewhere, and we were quite too tired. We said we’d manage somehow, and our guides withdrew.

The boys politely took the smaller room, and I understand they tossed pennies to see who should sleep on the floor. The apartment assigned to Belle Soeur and me was quite spacious and immaculately clean. Sleepy as we were, we took time to look at the numerous family photographs on the wall and to puzzle over a square soap-stone structure built into the side of the room, carved with names, dates and symbols. In size and shape it looked painfully like a sarcophagus. The names and dates and crosses on it added to the sepulchral effect. Could it be the custom of the Valais to keep departed relatives right on in the house where they had lived? The idea was so novel that we almost hoped it was so. In the morning, however, it proved to be nothing more exciting than a stove. Our landlady showed us the opening in the hall through which fuel was introduced into its interior. I don’t know what became of the smoke.

Our only other discovery before we lost ourselves in sleep was the date when the house was built, 1787, carved in a great rafter over our heads.

Belle Soeur and I tried to reduce our bulk by half and share the single bed, but before long she slipped off the edge without waking me and betook herself with the crocheted coverlet to the sofa.

IX

We were called in the gray dawn, and I remember the chill of the bathing water. This proved to be the most economical lodging any of us had ever had, for the charge was a franc and a half for each bed, so each individual share was fifteen cents!

We took breakfast at the hotel and had them put up a lunch for us, but nearly broke their hearts by declining to take a guide or even a porter. The faithful Baedeker had said “guide unnecessary in fine weather” (which it was), and we had no notion of putting ourselves in bondage to an attendant unless it was absolutely unavoidable.

After we turned aside from the Rhone valley, laid out like a patchwork quilt in cultivated fields, we saw no human being or habitation or trace of man’s labor, save an empty cow-hut or so and the path we were following, till late in the afternoon. The Eginenbach, whose course we were following, drained as wild and desolate a valley as could be imagined. It seemed to have been a great place for landslides, and every once in a while we had to pick our way over masses of fallen rock and débris. We felt like discoverers and rejoiced accordingly.

After some hours’ walking we found ourselves at the end of the valley and simultaneously lost every trace of our path. Now this was too much of a good thing, and our rejoicing was suspended.

The end of the valley was closed by a wall of rock about fifteen hundred feet high, which it was our business to surmount. On top of it was the Gries Glacier, which we were to cross, and which spilled over into our valley in an ice-fall from the base of which issued the Eginenbach. Somewhere there was a path, which at need a pack-horse could follow. But where on earth did it start from?

The land between us and the foot of the rock wall was a steep meadow covered with bowlders and broken cliff-fragments. It had been subjected to some sort of seismic disturbance, leaving fissures here and there, some of them of great depth and quite too wide to jump. We lost a lot of time retracing our steps and hunting for a way around, when we found one of these things in front of us. We understood now why Baedeker considered a guide advisable in foggy weather.

At last we all agreed that we had located the path about half-way up the wall where it crossed some snow. But how to get to it? Antonio announced his intention of making a bee-line scramble for that point, and, if necessary, following the path down to show us the beginning of it. The rest of us made a detour to the left (having already pretty well canvassed the possibilities to the right as far as the ice-fall), and were rewarded by finding the end of a really, truly, unmistakable bridle-path, hacked out of the rock in ledges and built up with masonry, which we followed steeply upward. Belle Soeur got a touch of the mountain sickness and had to lie down for a while. And I nearly slid into perdition when we crossed the hard-frozen snow gully, because I had trodden my heels over and the nails had worn smooth and my alpenstock had no iron point! Antonio was waiting for us on the other bank, and we continued upward together.

Finally we reached the top and saw before us the flat Eis-Meer which we were to cross. We beheld it with interest not untinged with emotion. For although we had been living in daily association with glaciers at Grindelwald, we had never set foot on one, and this was not only to be our maiden glacier-crossing, but we were to do it quite, quite alone!

In the meantime we sat down in a row on the path, our backs against the rock and our feet protruding out into space and ate the hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches that had been put up for us at Ulrichen. We were not as hardened to precipices then as we later became, and I remember the shiver with which I tossed egg-shells over the edge and felt as if I needed to hold on to keep from going with them.

Some rising clouds warned us to finish our meal and start on, for we could not afford to risk being caught by a fog on the Eis-Meer. The route was indicated by poles stuck up in the ice, but some were fallen, and even when standing they were not near enough together to be visible in thick weather.

It was very thrilling when we had clambered over the pile of débris at the edge and found ourselves on the flat, frozen slush of the Eis-Meer. We did not know what unfamiliar dangers might be lying in wait for us, but if they were there, we did not encounter them. There was no special beauty or grandeur in this view of a glacier. The ice had a yellowish, muddy look, and was perfectly flat. The midday sun was melting its surface, and countless little streamlets of water were running in all directions among the corrugations left by last night’s freeze. Here and there a stream would disappear suddenly into a fissure or an air-hole. These seemed to be of indefinite depth, but none which we saw that day were large enough to be a menace to life.

The threat of the clouds was not fulfilled, and we reached the other side of the glacier in half an hour or less without accident. Just beyond was the boundary between Switzerland and Italy, but there was not even a stone to mark it. Strange to say, we encountered no custom house on this route either here or later.

Presently we began to descend a path so steep that it was hard to keep one’s balance. Vegetation gradually reappeared, then some signs of humanity, an empty cow-hut or so, and finally, on a slope below us, we saw a group of men and women cutting and binding grass. And oh, the joyful Italianness of it! All the women had bright-colored kerchiefs on their heads and one wore a brilliant red skirt.

It was almost sunset when we reached the first village, Morasco, where, to our surprise, we found the inhabitants still speaking German. We asked for milk, and a statuesque girl brought us big bowls of it, warm from the cows, which we drank with great gusto, sitting flat on the little grass-plot around which were grouped the dirty stone huts which formed the village. In the next village they spoke Italian only. My question as to the road, put first in German, was not understood until turned into Italian. Think of the isolation of that handful of villagers in Morasco, shut off by the mountains from the people of Valais, whose descendants they doubtless are, and by the even more impassable language barrier from their neighbors in the valley!

We quickened our steps and reached the hotel at the Tosa Falls just before dark. Baedeker allows six and a half hours’ walk from Ulrichen to the Falls, but we had consumed nearly double the time. Of course he allows for no stops, and we had stopped for luncheon and for milk, for Belle Soeur’s mountain sickness, and for a number of photographs and five-minute rests, and we had lost about an hour hunting for our path at the head of the Eginen valley; but these things or others like them have always to be counted on, and we found it well, as a general rule, to allow from one and a half to twice the time given by Baedeker.

The Tosa Falls were disappointing. Baedeker’s double star and phrase “perhaps the grandest among the Alps” had raised our hopes too high. I doubt if any European waterfalls can look really impressive to an American who has seen his own country. They were at their best that evening after dinner when we wandered down the path a little way below the hotel and looked across and partly up at them, magnified in the dim light. There is a drop of four hundred and seventy feet, over a broad, bare, unpicturesque rock ledge.

The volume of water is respectable, but nothing more. I imagine we must have seen the river unusually full, for the upper valley was flooded to the extent of making walking difficult when we passed down.

We had our little growl about the hotel here, too, which charged more than its tariff given in Baedeker and showed a disposition, encountered for the first time on our trip, to run in extras on the bill. This might be considered a necessary accompaniment, however, of being in Italy. It was part of the “local color.”

The extent to which we had grown young through the simplicity of our life may be inferred from the character of our amusements. I can hardly realize now that I was one of four who found entertainment in the infantile game of mystifying our fellow-boarders across the dinner-table that evening by linguistic gymnastics! They were a row of unprepossessing Italians of the small-commercial-traveler type. We spoke French mostly, German a good deal, Spanish some and English a very little, while Antonio occasionally burst into Portuguese. Italian was the one thing we kept clear of, so they discussed us freely in it. They placed all our languages except the Portuguese, but what we were they could not make out. It especially worried the nervous little old man who subsequently created some excitement by squeezing the waitress’ hand as she passed him. Finally the silent fat man, who had taken no part in the discussion, stopped guzzling his food long enough to emit, above his tucked-in napkin, the following oracular statement, “They are North Americans.” Evidently the others accepted this as settling the matter, and we could not but admire his perspicacity, although he had missed on Antonio.

X

The following day, during which we progressed down the Val Formazza to its juncture with the Simplon road at Crevola and up that road as far as Iselle, has a color in my memory all its own. Italy went to our heads. Antonio reverted to type. All the Latin in him came to the surface. Up to now, under the influence of our society and his English grandfather, he had been the most quiet and reserved of us all. Now he suddenly warmed up and blossomed out in shrugs and gesticulations, in song and laughter. We all caught the contagion more or less. Our feet had wings down that lovely wooded valley, and we laughed at nothing for the pure joy of living. We exchanged greetings with all the cheerful, friendly peasants whom we met, so different from the unexpansive Swiss variety. If we did not actually see Pan and the mænads, I am sure they were not far away. The sky above us was different from the Swiss sky—warmer and brighter somehow. The vegetation was richer and more luxuriant. Our northern blood bubbled and effervesced under the enchanted touch of Italy. And in Antonio the South claimed her own again.

Even the discomfort of my shoes could not seriously dampen my enjoyment. Those trodden-over heels had become nearly unbearable; but when I caught one between two rocks and tore it off, the resulting limp was worse. It was not till the next morning that Frater evolved the brilliant thought of prying off the other heel to match, which was a great relief.

Feet and shoes are always a problem on a long pedestrian trip. A shoe too tight is misery, but one too large, which allows the foot to rub and chafe, is almost as bad. Any unhardened foot is sure to develop blisters after two or three days’ walking. These rub and break and leave the flesh raw. It isn’t pleasant, but in the high altitudes, where there are no bacteria, everything heals rapidly, and if one resolutely says nothing about it and keeps on walking, it isn’t so bad as it sounds. We were all in the same fix by this time. I know now that I bestowed more sympathy than was absolutely necessary on the “blistered and bleeding feet” of Washington’s army, over which I used to shed shuddering tears as a little girl.

At San Rocco, where we lunched, we found there was still more than fifteen miles between us and Crevola. So, as we had now struck the carriage road and the daily diligence was just about due, we decided to treat ourselves to a ride.

It was a sort of uncovered omnibus, and proved to have one vacant place too few for us, so Antonio sat on the steps. The driver must surely have been exercising his calling for the first time, for he did strange and fearful things all the way. The worst was when he evolved the wonderful thought of improvising a brake by putting a piece of stout cord-wood through the spokes of the two rear wheels. Of course something had to give way. The spokes cracked ominously and the wood, catching in one of the carriage springs as the wheel revolved, promptly broke it and tilted that side of the ’bus down most unpleasantly. All the passengers, except the priest and ourselves, objurgated the driver in fluent Italian, and the priest gave him some serious advice. So did Frater and Antonio, but I think theirs was in English. After this the driver became very sulky and took out his bad temper in language addressed to the poor horses, who really were not to blame. We were in momentary expectation of our vehicle’s falling to pieces, but it providentially held together while we were in it. I am sure, though, that the catastrophe must have occurred soon after we dismounted.

We sang most of the way (heaven save the mark!) partly to distract our minds from the supposed impending disaster, and partly because the priest enjoyed it so much. He kept his breviary open and his eyes fixed on it, but seldom turned a page and smiled broadly when the choruses grew joyous. He had a good face, that priest, and it was nice to see the way everybody greeted him with “Buon’ giorno, Riverenza” and “Addio, Riverenza,” on entering and leaving the stage.

Having reached Crevola, where the roads join, about four o’clock, perfectly fresh after our long drive, we decided to walk seven miles up the Simplon to Iselle before stopping for the night. The first part of the road was extremely pretty. There was a deep rocky gorge with a river at the bottom, feathery-leafed trees, and pale blue mountains, just like a landscape by Salvator Rosa. But when we came near Iselle, where the Italian entrance to the tunnel is located, the two sides of the road began to close up with shanties and rookeries. We met some thousands of workmen returning home after their day’s labor in the tunnel. Everything swarmed, reeked and crawled, and we began to wonder if we could possibly find a place to sleep in. We purchased a large watermelon, and ate it sitting on a pile of stones in a wilderness of cranes and derricks, comforting ourselves with the reflection that at least the inside of it must be uncontaminated!

We kept looking for the one hostelry mentioned by Baedeker, which proved to be at the extreme end of the long-drawn-out town. Our hearts sank as we saw it, for it was of an unspeakable griminess. Evidently it had become a workman’s boarding-house, pure and simple. We entered, with the faint hope of finding it better inside than out, but it wasn’t, and we were really relieved to learn that they had no room for us. We retraced our steps to the other hotel they told us about. It was a blaze of light. A promiscuous crowd of men were drinking and smoking on the front balcony, and a woman was banging concert-hall airs out of an atrocious piano inside. The air of dirt and slovenliness was inexpressible, and we were by no means sure the place was even technically respectable. The proprietor, who looked like a brigand, if ever I saw one, offered us one double room in the hotel and another across the street. Belle Soeur and I were not particularly timid, but we agreed that nothing conceivable would tempt us to spend the night in that hole, with our natural protectors in another building. A young German tourist, a pedestrian like ourselves, understanding our predicament, offered to share his room with Frater and Antonio, so as to keep the party under one roof. We thanked him and held his offer in reserve, but resolved to try first the one other inn which we had noticed in passing.

It proved to be kept by a gruff old German-speaking Swiss, and was, though plain, quite reasonably clean inside and of a reassuring respectability. The price—four francs apiece for lodging—struck us as high in view of the accommodations, and we said so. The reply was surprising. “If you had come to me first, it would have been less. But you visited every hotel in town and came to me as a last resort. I saw you when you passed.” The joyous shout of laughter with which we greeted this explanation seemed rather to nonplus the old man. But we made no further protest. His frankness was worth the money.

The balcony in front of our rooms overhung the noisiest river I ever heard, while our windows looked out on the main street, which was filled till midnight with an equally noisy stream of people; but it would have taken more than noise to keep us awake, now that we had clean sheets and felt safe.

We got away from unprepossessing Iselle as soon as possible the next morning. Although we had enjoyed our detour into Italy, I think all of us experienced a sense of relief when we passed the custom house a couple of miles up the road and found ourselves once more in clean, honest Switzerland.

This was an easy day for us, walking somewhat lazily up the easy grade of the excellent post-road which Napoleon was good enough to build for us. It was rather warm and we spent the entire day covering fifteen miles lengthwise and forty-four hundred feet of ascent.

The Simplon road has a great reputation for scenery, and doubtless it would be imposing if one came to it from the plains. But to us who had been living in the heart of the Oberland and who were fresh from that wild climb over the Gries Pass, it was disappointingly tame and sophisticated.

A road-house which we passed had a stone tablet cut into the wall, announcing that at this spot Napoleon stopped and drank a glass of milk. So we did the same (being probably thirstier than he) and paid several prices for the association’s sake.

We ate our luncheon under the shade of a big tree on a velvety meadow running down to a brook, where we refreshed ourselves by washing faces, hands and arms in the cold clear water.

By the way, do people generally realize that glacier water is not clear? It is always thick and muddy, a regular café-au-lait color. Some of the mountain streams which do not come from glaciers are almost as cold and are crystal clear.

We made it a general rule to drink no water on our tramps. Sometimes it was a great temptation, for we would get very thirsty walking, and we were always crossing cool little streams that looked the incarnation of innocence. Doubtless some of them were, but we had no means of knowing which was which.

Antonio was the thirstiest of our party and the most inclined to waive prudence and drink, but a graphic description of his shapely throat adorned with a large goiter usually had the desired restraining effect. He didn’t care a rap about typhoid, of which the danger was much greater. But we all draw the line somewhere, and he drew it at goiter!

This reminds me that goiter must be dying out in Switzerland. I don’t think we saw half a dozen cases all summer, but I remember it as one of the horrors of my childhood when I visited Switzerland before. It seems to me nearly every other old person had one then.

There is a hotel on top of the Simplon Pass, and there was no reason in the world why we should not patronize it; but we decided it would be much more interesting to lodge at the Hospice built and endowed by Napoleon and served by the monks of Saint Bernard.

It is a big, barracks-like stone building approached by an imposing flight of steps. At the top is a rope which it is the business of the visitor to pull. It sets a huge bell vibrating in the stone hallway and one feels that one has created an undue disturbance for a mendicant. A member of the brotherhood responds, one asks for hospitality for the night, he leads one to an immaculate bedroom and tells one the dinner hour.

We had taken a provisional farewell of each other on the doorstep before pulling the bell-rope, for we knew nothing of the customs of the place and had an idea that we feminine members of the quartette would probably be herded in some wing apart and not allowed to communicate with our escorts till we left. Nothing of the kind occurred. It was just as though we had been in a hotel, without the necessity of asking prices. They did not even expect us to attend chapel. The bare stone walls and floor lent an air of conventual austerity, and the presence of the monks reminded us where we were.

When the dinner-bell rang, we assembled, along with twenty or thirty other chance guests, at two long tables, and, to our surprise, the brotherhood ate with us. The meal, though plain, was generous in quantity, and they kept pressing us to eat more with true hospitality. We found our hosts very interesting to talk to. One old man took a profound interest in America, especially in the St. Louis exposition, and plied us with questions about it. Naturally we were more interested in asking about their life and mission, which seemed to us a delightful but highly incongruous survival of medievalism. They admitted that the Hospice served no very useful purpose in summer, but it did a big charity work spring and fall when thousands of Italian laborers were tramping into Switzerland and back, who could not afford to stop at the hotel, and during winter, when the hotel was closed, though travelers were few, the Hospice became a life-saving necessity to those who did go over the pass. After dinner they showed us the portrait of himself that Napoleon had given the Hospice and a few other treasured relics.

There is no charge whatever made for meals and lodging at the Hospice, and the offering one puts into the almsbox is entirely voluntary. We had to ask where this box was, and I do not think it would have been brought to our attention in any way had we failed to do so. I imagine many fail, or unduly consult economy in their offerings, for we noticed that our hosts, who had been most kind throughout, became positively effusive after we had deposited in the box—no princely sum at all, but just about what we calculated we would have expended at the hotel. I must say most of our fellow guests looked as if they deserved Frater’s characterization of “dead beats,” and yet the brothers told us that travelers often found fault with their accommodations! Probably the less they paid, the more fault they found. But even this sordid company could not spoil the sentiment of the place for us, and the memory of our night at the Hospice remains one of the jewels in our casket.

XI

Next morning, after dipping large hunks of dry bread into big steaming bowls of coffee and milk, along with the rest of the beneficiaries, we took a cordial farewell of our good hosts, and set out on our way. We soon reached the highest point of the pass (six thousand five hundred and ninety feet) and began the down grade with long swinging steps. This day, indeed, we could not afford to loiter very much, for we had a two o’clock train to catch at Brieg, fifteen miles away, and we must get our luncheon somewhere along the road in the meantime.

The scenery was pretty, even beautiful, but nowhere approaching grandeur on this day’s walk.

We caught that train—just, having run the last two blocks of the way, bought our tickets on the fly, and clambered aboard breathless and warm at the very last permissible moment. We felt quite pleased at the Americanness of our proceeding.

It was a very short ride to Visp, where we had to wait some time for the train to Zermatt. Here we were back in the Rhone valley, twenty odd miles below where we had left it at Ulrichen three days before! It was fairly palpitating with the heat that particular afternoon. In fact it seemed to be doing so whenever we met it.

I thought we would be less uncomfortable if we did something, so I pointed out the towers and spires of what appeared to be a very picturesque castle on a hill in the center of the town and dragged off the reluctant family to visit it. It turned out to be an optical illusion produced by two churches in line, neither of which was in the least interesting, but our united temperature had been raised several degrees in learning this. I must say that the family took the matter very amiably.

Finally the Zermatt train got ready to start. I wouldn’t like to say how many hours it took us to travel the twenty-two and a half miles of this road, but we spent the remainder of the afternoon on it. It is true that we ascended more than three thousand feet on the way, but the speed of our train was certainly not excessive.

Zermatt is the highest of the big tourist resorts, its altitude being five thousand three hundred and fifteen feet. Its season is short, but very crowded. The town in itself is exceedingly ugly—all hotels and tourist shops and the mushroom air of an American boom-town born over-night. But the surrounding mountains are glorious. The Matterhorn, which is close at hand, we were all gazing at, spellbound, for the first time. We had never before quite believed its pictures. Nobody ever does. I don’t suppose there is such another peak in the world—bizarre, incredible, rankly impossible, like the acute-angled mountains children draw on their slates. It made one shiver to think of human beings climbing up those all-but-vertical smooth rock sides to the needle peak nine thousand feet above us, and it was hardly surprising to hear that the local graveyard is filled with the bodies of tourists from many lands who have attempted it unsuccessfully.

The climbers’ tragedies, repeated each summer, are tragic enough, the more so for their utter uselessness. But the poetry which these have inspired, having missed the sublime, has fallen into the ridiculous.

One choice bit, taken from one of the local guides obligingly gotten up by the Swiss government in all languages and distributed free at the Bureaus of Information in the principal cities, filled us with especial glee:

“No dread crevasse, no rugged steep,

No crag on the dizzy height,

But knows the crash of a human heap

Thudding into the night.

* * * * *

Ask not the dead, who slumber now

In the village grave hard by

How they rolled from the mountain brow

And toppled down from the sky.”

The Matterhorn from the outskirts of Zermatt

Isn’t the “crash of a human heap” an altogether delightful expression? And will you please imagine anyone’s so violating meter and manners as to make that foolish inquiry of “the dead in the village grave”? As for us, we rejoiced over these gems and others like them all the way up from Visp (when we weren’t looking out of the windows), and “toppling down from the sky” became part of our daily vocabulary.

The swarms of tourists in Zermatt oppressed us, and we looked with dread at the caravansaries which housed them. As usual, there seemed to be just one long street, and we followed it to the other end, hoping for a sequestered spot where we could be at peace with the mountains. At the very outskirts of the village we came upon a quiet, clean little house called the Pension des Gorges du Trift, and here we straightway resolved to hang up our hats and knapsacks.

This was the end of our first week’s tramping, and we all voted it a grand success as we sat on a damp bench after dinner watching the red lights on the cascades of the Trift, which was the special property of our small hostelry. I don’t care much, as a rule, for artificially lighted waterfalls, but this seemed to be so entirely our own private personal illumination of an otherwise untouched wilderness, and the porter was so beautifully proud of it that we couldn’t have found it in our hearts to object.

Bright and early next morning we went to the post-office and got the first mail we had had since leaving home. Very delightful it was to hear that the Babes and the Mother were flourishing, the household machinery running smoothly and that we were to stay away as long as we liked!

The next thing I did, while other members of the party were renewing kodak supplies, was to buy a pair of shoes and have the soles well studded with nails. And what a heavenly relief it was to get proper footgear again on my poor feet!

These preliminary errands attended to, we took the mountain railroad to the Riffelberg and walked from there to the summit of the Gornergrat. The railroad goes within a fifteen-minute walk of the top, but both economy and pleasure counseled us to get out at the earlier station.

I recall the fellow-citizen from Keokuk or Kokomo, I forget which, who sat opposite to us in the open car going up. He thirsted for some statistical information, which Antonio, who is the soul of courtesy, supplied. Whereupon he fastened like a leech on the poor boy and began plying him with questions till the rest of us had to plunge in to rescue him and keep a few tattered shreds of our personal history from that relentless cross-examiner! We were glad to leave him at the Riffelberg.

The view from the Gornergrat is certainly one of the grandest on God’s earth. Here, as nowhere else, can the average person, without danger or fatigue, get into the very heart of the glacier world. One stands on a rocky ledge, the Gornergrat, and all around and below sweep and swirl the great frozen rivers. From their far brink rise the bare jagged peak of the Matterhorn and the round snow-clad shoulders of the Breithorn and Monta Rosa. Way down below lies the green valley with Zermatt in its hollow, and away as far as the eye can reach are ranges upon ranges of snow mountains.

If we could have had it all to ourselves without the tourists! But then we should have had to work very much harder for it. It is better to take the gifts which the gods provide and be thankful.

It did not seem to me as if I could ever come to love the Valais mountains as I did those of the Oberland, but they were magnificent.

We had reached our maximum altitude thus far for the summer, 10,290 feet. The air was very thin, and we watched Belle Soeur carefully for signs of the mountain sickness. But thanks, I suppose, to our having made all but eighteen hundred feet of the ascent by rail and the careful slowness with which we had climbed the remainder, she escaped this time entirely.

We ate our lunch on a rock overlooking the great Gorner glacier, just as far from the tourists and the summit restaurant as we could get. Then, when we had looked our fill and tried to store our minds with enough glacier pictures to last the rest of our lives, we began the long but delightful descent afoot to Zermatt. All the way down we kept getting beautiful views, and I think the Matterhorn never looked finer than seen between the fir trees of the lower slopes in the pink glow of sunset.

Who would have guessed that our harmonious little party was going to be disrupted on the morrow—and by me, its shepherd and chaperon!

XII

An exhaustive account of the causes leading up to my famous elopement with the cash capital would lead us far afield. If the man from Kokomo were here to cross-examine me, he would probably get it all out of me. But he is not. I shall, therefore, make no attempt to gain credit for the really noble and altruistic motives which animated me, and the reader will have to make his own diagnosis. He will probably decide that eight days of being called Fräulein and Mademoiselle had turned my matronly head and produced an Indian-summer florescence of the practical-joking age. Or he may explain my conduct as one of those occasional eccentric outbursts in usually well-disciplined characters, such as have been celebrated in a whole cycle of short stories of “The Revolt of Mother” and “Wild Oats of a Spinster” type. It really doesn’t matter. My shoulders are broad, and my reputation, I think, will stand the strain. At all events, I hope so.

It happened that on the day following the Gornergrat trip we resolved to take it easy. We slept late in the morning, had our lunch put up for us at the hotel and wandered out with it in the direction of the Staffel Alp, resolved not to go all the way unless we felt like it. Now, we had been living a pretty strenuous life, and relaxing the bent bow all at once was a little risky. We were in prime physical condition, and the masculine half of the party, not having wholly emerged from the colt stage, were distinctly feeling their oats. I don’t wish to go into horrid details, but when it came time for luncheon Belle Soeur and I found ourselves without any.

“I give you infants fair warning,” said I, “that if the bearer of the common purse should be pushed too far, she might take her doll rags and go home, and it might prove inconvenient.”

This threat referred to the fact that they had all given me their money to take care of at the beginning of the trip, I being the one who made the business arrangements and paid the bills and who was supposed to be least likely to leave it all under a pillow. But Frater replied jeeringly, “Oh, you can’t frighten me that way! I’ve got eight francs in my pocket!” And Antonio chimed in, “I’ve got six-fifty.”

“All right,” said I, “good-bye. Shall we go get some luncheon, Belle Soeur?”

As soon as we were out of hearing on the path back to Zermatt, we began to discuss what we should do. For one wild moment we considered the expediency of just disappearing—taking a train and going off somewhere and leaving the boys to settle the hotel bill with their fourteen francs fifty as best they could. We soon decided that this would be too low-down mean. So little by little we plotted the details of a modified disappearance, including the fairy story which was supposed to save our “face” and the boys’ at the hotel. We rushed in with an air of great haste. Would they show us the time-table? Would they get our bill ready? We had received word which made it necessary to curtail our visit and go home immediately. We could not even wait for the two gentlemen, who had gone on a long tramp and might not be back till late. We would leave a note of explanation for them, and they would doubtless take the first train. Yes, we would pay for all. It would make it easier for them if they had just time to catch a train. So we hustled our belongings into our knapsacks, and I wrote a letter to Frater saying we had decided to go to Leuk (on the hill) that evening by rail, that they could rejoin us there on foot the next day if they wished to, and that the second morning, if they had not appeared, we would continue over the Gemmi Pass and home according to program. I also mentioned that the hotel bill had been paid.

All this time we were momentarily expecting the arrival of the boys to make their peace. But they did not come.