August 18.—Down at 5 A.M.; but as the people of the house are not yet accustomed to such hours, did not get away till six. A good deal of linen that was in the washerwoman’s hands had been left out during the night on the roadside rails in front of the inn. Here it is taken for granted that every peasant, and that every one, too, who passes along the road, and it is one of the most frequented roads of the country, is an honest man. Of course they are honest, because almost every one has property, or expects to have it, and has been brought up among those who have it. The instincts, therefore, which property engenders have become universal. These instincts, where the properties are small, are industry, frugality, forethought, and honesty. Some years ago, while travelling in the East, I had collected for my friends at home a bundle of walking-sticks, made from the mid-rib of the palm leaf, the olive wood of Jerusalem, and the balsam of the Jordan. Wherever I had gone I had left the bundle about unheeded, knowing that no one would meddle with it. Where a woman may go unmolested through lonely ways, with several gold coins conspicuously displayed on her head, there cannot be much disposition to pilfer. It was dark, when on my return to England, I landed at Southampton. My luggage had to be taken by the dock servants from the quay of the dock to the custom-house, only a few yards. In those first few yards on English soil, half-a-dozen of the best sticks were stolen. In the custom-house I called the attention of the dock people to this inferiority in our English civilization; and with some emphasis dwelt on the words stolen and thief. I was informed that my language was actionable; and that it would be taken down in writing, if only I would be so good as to repeat it. This I had no objection to do, if only the writer would head his notes with the dicta, that the man who endeavours to screen a thief is as bad as the thief; and that if the property stolen has been entrusted to the safe keeping of the thief, and he, and those whose servant he is, are paid for protecting it, the theft is of an aggravated kind. Of course no more was said about taking down in writing my estimate of the occurrence. The sight this morning of the linen which had been left out all night by the roadside brought that little matter back to my recollection, and led me to infer that there must be some condition in the arrangements of society at Trafoi, as there had been in the East, which worked effectively in favour of honesty, while there must have been something at Southampton that worked in the opposite direction.

The walk down the Stelvio below Trafoi was not altogether lacking in distinctiveness of feature, as must be the case with every mountain-bounded valley, and indeed with every object in nature. What most arrests attention here is some little peculiarity in the manner in which the mountain summits have been weathered away, and the decay of the rock brought down to form the lower slopes now occupied by forests, and by the bottom lands which man has reclaimed for grass. About Trafoi, and for some way below it, you are able to look into the forests on the flank of the mountain on the opposite side of the stream. You see there that many decaying trunks of pines strew the ground. They were thrown down by storms, or fell through age, and no one thought it worth his while to remove them, and bring them across the stream. The people, then, are few, and the pines are plentiful. This led us to discuss the question, whether it was on the cards that Trafoi should become another Pontresina. I was disposed to hold that it would. We can see no reason why the stream of tourists that has now reached Pontresina should not flow further. Trafoi comes next. What brought it to Pontresina is present here to bring it on to Trafoi. Here is a great snowfield, and a grand view of it: mighty summits, more or less difficult of access and ascent; and a better climate, for it admits of the growth of potatoes, and even of cabbages; and the Tyrol is open to you by the Vintschgau in much the same way as the eastern Grisons are from Pontresina by the Engadin. Its turn then, I think, will come, unless some better point of view can be found in the circumference of the Ortler group, and which shall be at the same time easily accessible. Indeed, even now all that is wanted is the construction of a carriage road over the Stretta and Foscagno Passes to save the long round by Tirano on the south, or by Martinsbruck on the north. I am, therefore, disposed to think that the purchase of land at Trafoi would prove a good investment. I saw that the line for a road over the Foscagno was already staked out. The special advantages of Pontresina are the sense of space about it, which you have not here at Trafoi, and that it is not only accessible itself but that also much is accessible from it. Should the stream, however, reach Trafoi, we may be sure that charges will not remain at the moderate level at which I found them, both there and at Santa Maria.

At last our valley of Trafoi, which had been trending north, debouched into the valley of the Adige, the direction of which at this point is from west to east. Had we descended it on the right, it would have brought us to Meran and Botzen. But as I now had to begin to set my face homewards we took the road to the left up the valley. Our destination was Tauffers. The day was very warm, and there was little air; we now, therefore, began to regret the hour that had been lost at starting. Between the point at which we left the Stelvio road and Glurns are two villages. We stopped at the inn of the first of the two for a glass of Austrian beer. I do not know whether the Austrian excise, plus the cost of carriage, would justify the price asked, or whether the lady of the house was demoralized by the unwonted apparition of an Englishman, it being supposed popularly, that every Englishman has a gold mine in his pocket; she did, however, demand, and received, one franc and forty cents for two glasses, each of which contained not much more than half a pint. Glurns, which is walled and fortified in the old style, is the chief town hereabouts. A little beyond it you come to a scene which has a curious effect. You are turning round the foot of the mountain on your left; but if you will look up the valley of the Adige beyond Glurns, you will see a perfectly smooth, broad grass expanse, descending gradually towards you. It may be somewhat less than a mile wide, and two miles or more long. It is impossible for you to see it without thinking of a glacier; indeed it is very like the one we saw yesterday, flowing down from Monte Cristallo towards the summit of the Stelvio. If it were buried in snow you would probably take it for a glacier. Of course the site of this grand breadth of prairie was in old time formed by glacier action: but it is strange that the glacier should have formed it so precisely after its own image. Another peculiarity of this prairie is that it is totally unbacked by either near or distant mountains. All along its further side the sky line is the grass line. I never saw this before in Alpine scenery. Everywhere else whether you look up, or down, an expanse of grass land, mountains close the view, and supply the sky line.

Some two miles from Tauffers we passed through a short-turfed cow-pasture, with thinly scattered small larch, and thickly scattered small fragments of rock. It was several hundred acres in extent. Its whole surface was blue with the flower spikes of a small species of Veronica. Christian, who is somewhat observant of plants, was unacquainted with it. This shows that the climate is here very different from what it is in the neighbourhood of Pontresina, of course in the direction of being warmer and drier. This field of blue supported an observation I had previously made that I know of no country—we were now again close to the Swiss frontier—in which there are so many flowers as in Switzerland of this colour, both as regards the number of species and of individuals. The preponderance of blue is certainly not the rule on the limestone hills that stand round about Jerusalem, and which are remarkable in spring for abundance of flowers, nor is it in any other mountain region with which I am acquainted.

Our road was now again on the ascent; the sun was hot; the air was still; and perhaps the Austrian beer aggravated the effects of the ascent and of the heat. Tauffers, contrary to what we had expected, was not yet in sight; and so our then state of body and mind suggested to us the thought that the Teufel had taken away Tauffers. At last, however, it came in sight, and this expression of our discomfort was no longer tenable. Still the ascent continued, and the heat became more aggravating; and though we plodded on we got no nearer to it. It was clear now that Tauffers was the Teufel. Even the sight of its three churches did not dissipate this supposition; for we were disposed to be cynical, and so they only reminded us of the saying, of course the result of the experience of mankind, that ‘the nearer the church the farther from heaven.’ The village, therefore, which has the greatest number must be the farthest off of all. Our suppositions and cynicism were not abandoned when we had entered Tauffers, and on applying at the White Cross, which the Austrian Preventive official at Trafoi had strongly recommended to us, had found that their only bedroom was engaged for the night. These are small jests, but they were at the time enough to laugh at, and lightened the way.

There was, however, another inn in the place, the Lamb, and that, fortunately, was both a better house and had all its accommodation at our disposal. We were shown upstairs to the reception-room. It was evident that it had not been used for some days, for the table and benches were covered with a thick stratum of long undisturbed dust. This, as the windows were closed, and are seldom opened, their purpose being to admit light, and not also air, must have required a long time for its deposition. The woman of the house, with an infant in her arms, and radiant with good-nature, and the desire to do all she could for her guests, swept off the dust with her apron. The first question was of course the old standing question of all wayfarers. What could be had for dinner? We did not care whether it was bifteck, or côtelettes de mouton. The radiancy was extinguished. It was as if a rosy dawn had been suddenly overcast by dark clouds. These viands were unknown in Tauffers. Having failed in this reconnaissance, we fell back on what we deemed must always be in this part of the world a secure position: she could, then, let us have some dried beef. In Tauffers that also was unknown. Things began to look serious. There was nothing to fall back upon; and so we must now take our chance, from which, however, we could not see exactly what was to be expected. We, therefore, gave the good woman a carte blanche: let us have whatever could be had for keeping body and soul together in Tauffers. This seemed to reassure her. She began to enumerate the best resources, the luxuries, of the place. We might have macaroni soup. Very well! We might have a salad with eggs. Excellent! A pause. Could we have bread and butter? We might have the bread but not the butter. There was no butter in Tauffers. None? None: but she would send off a despatch to the alpe, and perhaps might get us some for supper. At all events she could let us have some cheese? She could: but it would be only meagre cheese. There was no fat cheese in the place. Well, then, let us have for dinner the macaroni soup, the salad and eggs, the bread and the meagre cheese; and let us have all these viands as soon as possible. Yes, yes. We should have them all in half an hour.

More than an hour having passed, and there being no symptoms even that the table would ever be prepared for receiving the dinner, we again summoned the good woman to ask the cause of the delay. Had she to wait till the macaroni was made, or till her hens had laid the eggs? No! no! She had lost the key of the linen chest, and had been an hour looking for it: but now she would break the lock. This we peremptorily forbade. To-morrow it would be all the same to us that we had dined to-day, as we had dined often before, and might often again in the future, without a table-cloth and napkins. But the loss of the lock would to the good woman be an abiding loss: for such places have no locksmiths; and the franc, or so, a new lock would cost, is in Tauffers something considerable. Like the good man of Livigno, she regarded our reasoning as sophistical. It was the voice of the Tempter, endeavouring to persuade her to do what her conscience told her was wrong. The sacrifice must be made. And so it was: for a few minutes afterwards she re-entered the room with the indispensable linen, and began to lay the cloth, smoothing it down with a touch and air that implied that she knew its value, and how much it had just cost her.

The dinner soon followed. First the soup. After one has been out for six and a half hours in a hot sun, and has withal begun to feel a little fagged, any warm liquid, that can be swallowed without offence to the palate, seems comfortable. Fatigue makes one shrink from anything cold, from an instinct of the system that it would rather not make the effort to bring the cold draught up to the temperature of the body. We were, therefore, not rigid critics of the gastronomic merits, or demerits, of this macaroni soup. It was enough that it was comforting; as it certainly was to the good woman to find that we had so far approved of it, as to have emptied the basin. Like the soup at Peist, it would probably on analysis have yielded no evidence that meat of any kind had in any way entered into its composition. Of what, then, had it been made? I believe of the same ingredients; that is to say, it was a broth of herbs, enriched with spices, among which mace predominated, and thickened with vermicelli and flat macaroni. And now the pièce de résistance, the salad, was placed on the table, supported with twelve hard-boiled eggs. The lettuce was crisp and good, and the oil with which it was profusely dressed, was not rancid. I managed to dispose of three of the eggs. I could go no further. Christian placed himself outside the remaining nine. For this, though he had been encouraged to complete the achievement, he thought some apologies necessary. Guides, he remarked deprecatingly, always had good appetites. Apologies, I told him, were quite unnecessary, for his dinner had to sustain the porter as well as the guide. And this justification of his appetite I made him understand was not invented for the occasion, but was the result of the long and hard experience of a poor woman, who having had to provide daily bread for eight small children, had explained to me that, though there were only eight mouths to feed, yet in fact, as each child had two natures, his growing nature, and his natural nature, she had to feed daily sixteen natures. This put Christian quite at his ease. It did even more, for it made him feel how superior his bachelor condition was to that of the poor sixteen-natures-weighted woman. As to the meagre cheese, it tasted like nothing in particular: not even much like cheese. The bread was white, and not yet sufficiently old to have become a petrifaction.

So ended our dinner to the satisfaction of all concerned; perhaps to that of the good woman most of all, who, seeing how her soup, and salad, and eggs had been dealt with, could not refrain from an announcement of her hope of being able to get the butter by supper time. As soon as we had taken possession of the room, I had opened the window. I now leaned out of it to see what from this point could be seen of Tauffers. Our inn was on what might be called the place of Tauffers. Opposite to it was the public fountain; and beyond that a large house. It was now four in the afternoon. The village is far from small, and must contain about 500 inhabitants. Several ploughs, drawn by cows, or bullocks, of a diminutive breed, were returning from their daily tasks. For the human toilers, however, the day’s work was far from done, for a continued succession of little carts, full of manure, each containing at most what might have been put into four or five wheelbarrows, was going out to the fields. Every now and then a woman would pass with an enormous bundle of hay in a hempen sheet on her head, or shoulders. The woman of the large house opposite was in the road, cutting the trunks of some long cembras with a cross-cut saw into klafter lengths (six feet), aided by a sturdy little boy as her mate. When the cutting was completed, the pieces were carried by the two, and piled up against the outer wall of the house, facing the street. This is done universally, for though the fuel is thus left in the street, there are no dishonest people to pilfer it. This woman’s house was a large one, and would require here an establishment of two or three servants, and an income of 300l. or 400l. a year. But I was told that the family that occupied it had no servants; indeed, that there was not a domestic servant in the place; that every family in Tauffers did its own work; and that the family in the big house had not 60l. a year to spend.

Behind the big house, and just above the town, for as things go in these parts it is more than a village, is a strange-looking mountain. It is of an equally sharp incline from top to bottom, smooth on the surface, without rocks or trees, and only half clothed with a very threadbare vegetation; this half clothing being as even as the underlying soil which shows through it. The vegetation, then, being poor, and the soil pale, the general colouring is not grass green, but a kind of celadine. In the evening I went some way up it to see of what its soil and vegetation consisted. The soil was of a much disintegrated gritty kind of rock; but as the disintegration hardly proceeded beyond the point of grit, no turf could be formed upon it, for the rainwater that did not run down its steep incline, ran through it, as through a sieve. And that, of course, that ran down over such a surface would take with it any mould that there might have been an incipient attempt to accumulate. This decided the character of the vegetation. No plant could maintain itself on such a station, unless it had good roots for holding on, was able also to do with very little moisture, and to live all the while on a diet as simple and meagre as that which was supporting the inhabitants of the neighbouring town. The species were mostly veronicas, pinks, sedums, and saxifrages. The majority of them, therefore, were such as are on a close inspection conspicuous for their flowers. Almost the only grass was an agrostis which affects poor and dry stations. These plants were nowhere continuous. Each seemed to require, or had at all events received from the grace of circumstances, some elbowroom. The vegetation, then, of the mountain belonged to the class of things that improve on a near acquaintance, for when you were upon it you found that it was decked with a great variety of very bright, though humble, flowers. I was sorry to see that an attempt had been made to plant a part of the mountain with cembras. The little plants had been set each in a little hole, and were only a few inches high. One can hardly believe that in a century they will be many more feet. But should they ever rise above the ground, which as yet they show no disposition to do, their presence will destroy the singular character of the mountain.

The first stage of the ascent brings you to a church: I suppose the pilgrimage church of Tauffers, for it is very common in this part of the world to find a church on an eminence, at a little distance off, to climb up to which, and attend its services on certain days, and at certain seasons, or for certain classes, or for certain objects, is a meritorious act, which will secure some special favour from some local saint, or some saint that respects the locality, or whom the locality respects. On reaching this church, I found that it stood on a little excavated and levelled platform, a kind of niche, on the shoulder of the mountain. On this little stage the water could hang longer than on the declivity, and there was besides the water that came off the roof of the building. This had encouraged the grass immediately around it, and up to its walls, to grow vigorously. While walking round it, to get a view of a ruined castle beyond it, I came suddenly on a little girl upon her knees, intently employed in chopping the long grass with a sickle-shaped knife, and depositing the handfuls in an old cloth. Not another soul was in sight, or within hailing. She appeared to be about 9 years of age. It was evening. The sun was low, and the valley was in shade; but, here was this little body, not playing with her fellows at the end of the day, not looking out for her father’s return from his labours, but labouring hard herself, far from home, and all alone. The evening, which brings rest to all, and the mother to her child, had not brought rest to this little premature grass-cutter, and had separated her from her mother. As I came down the mountain, half an hour later, when the remains of light were fast retiring before the brown shades of approaching night, I overtook on the path the little body, with her burden, as big as herself, on her head. This bundle of coarse grass was to be made into hay, and added to the store of winter provender for the goats and cows of the family.

Such is the training of life for all in Tauffers. Nature intended it to be hard, but not so hard as the crimes and follies of man have made it. Half of this little body’s evening task, and half of the daily and yearly toil of every man, woman, and child in Tauffers is lost to them. They have to task themselves with the toil; and then half the fruits of the toil is snatched from the hands of the toilers, and sent to Vienna to support 1,000,000 men in arms, for which a second tax in flesh and blood is levied on poor Tauffers, and to pay the bondholders of a debt incurred through the profitless, and futile attempts of Austria to maintain a hateful dominion in Italy, and a shadowy and impossible hegemony in northern Germany.

On the mountain above the church you get a good view of this broad interesting valley—up and down. You see how much land there is available for cultivation, and how carefully it is cultivated, and what a large population it is supporting. Several villages are in sight, and you will be able to count a hundred houses in Tauffers, which lies at your feet. The view is more diversified than one coming from the Grisons will have lately seen. It has much land in corn as well as in grass. The expanse is sufficiently broad to give you the idea of its being a substantial component part of the scene, and not merely a little strip reclaimed from the foot of the mountains. It is in itself something considerable, and in the general effects of the view can hold its own against them. The mountains, too, right and left, and before you, are grand; the latter ending against the sky in the snowy summits about the Stelvio. At this point also you are not far from the three old ruined castles of Tauffers. As I looked at them, I thought that if we could recover the details of their day, we should find that the civilized exactions of a modern empire are not greater—perhaps they may be more all-pervading, though we will not be positive even on that point—than were the rude exactions of mediæval local oppressors. The old Baron, like the modern Kaiser, appealed to the sense of glory, but whoever it might have been that was glorified, it was no more then, than it is now, the poor peasant. And there was then, as now, a claim for personal loyalty, in return for protection; but then, as now, it was a protection that was very costly to those who were supposed to be protected. So wags the world. One unsatisfactory condition is exchanged for another that does not give satisfaction. But, throughout, men are dreaming of, and hoping and striving for, something better. And dreams, and hopes, and efforts have hitherto been the salt of life.

As I re-entered the village I passed a châlet surrounded by grass. On the grass, in front of the house, were spread out to bleach three pieces of coarse hempen linen, the winter labours of, I suppose, three families. They were of varying lengths. I paced them, as I passed, and found that the longest measured about fifty yards. The differences in length indicated, perhaps, not so much differences in industry, for here all are industrious to the best of their ability, as differences in the opportunities for this kind of work, and in the number of hands, in the families to which the pieces respectively belonged. Considering how slowly the shuttle advances in the hand-loom, I wondered that any human being could have the patience to weave these fifty yards of linen, and hoped that the time would come when the rewards of labour would in these valleys be such as to enable these poor women to withdraw from this old-world monotonous form of labour; and when among them, as among all people claiming to be civilized, all the coarser kinds of labour, which task not the intelligence, but only the hands and muscles, of men, and still more if of women, will be delegated to iron and steam.

And now we had returned to the hotel; for, as it was getting late, Christian had gone out to the mountain to fetch me in for supper. The good woman set before us the coffee, the milk, the cheese, the bread, and last of all another platter, with ‘Behold the butter!’ She was duly thanked; and afterwards assured that the world could show none better, and that the merits of the coffee and of the milk were equally indisputable. While we were at supper three German pedestrians came in. They were on their way to Bormio by the Umbrail Pass. They took the other end of the long table, and in time their supper was served. They had no coffee, but instead of it, the same kind of soup we had had at dinner. The salad and eggs were not reproduced. Our dinner, possibly, had caused a dearth of the latter. Instead of the white wheaten bread, with which we had been served, they had black rye-bread.

August 19.—Left Tauffers at 5 A.M. Our destination for the day was Tarasp in the Engadin; the way was up the Val Avigna over the Cruschetta, the Pass of the Scarljöchl, and then by the Scarlthal. The morning was bright and frosty with the air from the north. After ascending for two hours, all the way through forest, to my surprise we came on an irrigated meadow of about four acres. It could belong only to Tauffers, for there had been no gaps in the mountains all the way up. So far then, had these industrious people gone, and up so rough a way, to level and irrigate this little bit of land. Every stone had been cleared from it. It was as smooth as a lawn. The channel, too, for bringing the water to it, though not long, had not been easy to construct. I imagined them toiling up to their work, and then bringing down the hay along the rocky pathway they had made for this purpose, and for bringing down timber; and then in imagination I saw the Austrian tax-collector seize upon, and carry off, half the produce of their labour. It would have been a cruel misfortune, if, after they had had all the trouble of making their meadow and road, an earthquake had swallowed up, or a slip from the mountain had buried, just half of their meadow. But in that case the first loss would have been all. There would have been no more labour expended on the swallowed up, or buried half. That would have been bad; but what the government does is worse. It obliges them, year after year, to keep up, to irrigate, and to make the hay upon, this half, and to bring it down to Tauffers; and then it takes it all away from them. And this is to go on for ever.

We had now got beyond the forest, and, therefore, looked back for the Ortler: and there was its perfectly-shaped dome, rising above the mountains that form the eastern boundary of the Munsterthal, not to any great height above them, but still a conspicuous and noble object—a symmetrical dome of purest snow. Of course the higher up we advanced, the loftier to us the dome would become. Forty minutes further on, just below the last rise to the summit of the Pass, we came upon another surprise in the form of a second prairie. We were now nearly three hours from Tauffers, and as the forest had ended with the first prairie, the road had been continued up to this point exclusively for the sake of the second: this last part of it, however, had not been difficult to make for it was over Alpine pasture, and only required the removal of rocks and stones in the lines the rullies would take in going to and fro. The moral of the sight was that when people work upon their own land and in that sense for themselves, they work with a will, which will take no denial, and which will not even be discouraged by the claims of a government to go shares with them in the fruit of their labours. This prairie was larger than the one lower down. Like that it had been carefully levelled and irrigated; though, of course, as the elevation was much greater, the hay was not so good: it was, in fact, not so grassy, being largely compounded of non-gramineous plants. From the same cause its growth was shorter, and it came later to maturity. This was August 19, and the last load was, as we passed by, being laid on the little rully on which it was to be taken down to Tauffers. The man who was loading it, was working alone. He was a spare weather-beaten veteran.

Beyond this last upland prairie was the summer châlet for the alpe around, on the mountain flanks. At the back of the châlet was the natural rock staircase up to and over the Pass. When we got near the top the path lay over a stream of clean loose rock, with unfilled interstices, and beneath these, quite out of sight but well within hearing, was rushing along the stream of water, collected from the heights right and left. On the summit we stood for some minutes feeding our eyes with a farewell look at the noble Ortler. Its snowy dome now stood high above the black ridge of the Munsterthal mountains, which, as a base, with the two long ranges of the Val Avigna for its equal side-lines, formed at this point a long acute-angled triangle. At its apex on the Cruschetta we were standing.

The way was now down hill for four hours to Tarasp: at first over high Alpine pastures. Here we passed the ashes of a fire that had been kept up last night to scare away from the cattle a bear, which was supposed to be in the neighbourhood. After a time the pastures thinned out, and the path entered on a narrow gorge between precipitous fawn-coloured mountains. It then passed over a reach of pebbly débris, which the stream of the Clemgia had in times of flood washed clean. It was a scene of much desolation. ‘You see,’ said Christian, ‘how much more destructive in this country water is than fire can be. Fire may be arrested; and at the worst destroys only what can be replaced. But water cannot be arrested, and it destroys not only moveables and houses, but also the precious land itself, the source of all our wealth.’ As we passed through this scene of its destructive action, walking over the rocks, and rocky rubble it had brought down, and across the deep seams it had cut in these deposits, I felt that if one must be caught in a bad storm, there would be few places that would not be preferable for the encounter to such a gorge as this, where one would have about as much chance of escaping as a minnow has from the throat of a pike. As the gorge became still narrower the path was now obliged to leave the level of the torrent, and mount some way up the flank of the right hand mountain. This soon brought us into the forest; and, as the sun was bright, the air was incensed with the fragrant exhalations of the Scotch fir, which hereabouts was abundant. We were now about four miles from Tarasp. In front of us to the north-west, beyond the Engadin, many snowy summits were in sight. On the topmost point of each the sun had raised into the otherwise unbroken blue a cloud-banner. These cloud-banners were of very different forms, each appearing to retain its own form persistently. One was a cap of liberty; another a wide-spread oak; another an inverted pyramid attached to its mountain-top by its apex. At last after about four miles of the forest, its trees having now become larch, we got down to the level of the Engadin. Schuls was on the opposite bank; but instead of crossing the Inn to Schuls, we turned to the left, and having crossed the Clemgia, not far from its junction with the Inn, took up our quarters at, I believe, the Belvidere, the most southern of the numerous hotels of Vulpera, a hamlet of hotels, about half a mile from the Curhaus of Tarasp, which is an enormous establishment on the left bank of the Inn. It was 12.30 P.M. and we had been out seven and half hours without a halt.

As we had now got back to the Engadin Christian Grass’s engagement had terminated. He was to receive 15 francs a day, returning being paid for at the same rate as service. This is the regular market price at Pontresina for long engagements. It would not be so high were there more guides, or fewer tourists. You may sometimes hear those who have paid lower prices elsewhere speak of Pontresina guides as extortionate. This is a mistake. The higher and the lower prices are alike the market prices: only here the market is in favour of the guide, while in such a population as that of Meiringen it is in favour of the tourist. I was sorry to part with Christian, but my plans would not for the next three or four days require a porter; and as the wind was now northerly, and the weather seemed to have arranged itself for a period of ‘settled fine,’ he appeared to wish to get back to Pontresina for the chance of some twenty-five franc days on the glaciers. After dinner, then, having entrusted my belongings to the Post, which would now for a few days be my porter, I accompanied him, for he would forthwith commence his return home, as far as Tarasp. As I returned up hill to my hotel at Vulpera, a feeling came over me as though I had undergone a sudden transformation from a well enough contented tourist into a lone wanderer far from home. For the moment neither the thought of home, nor of wandering far from home, pleased. Life seemed a pilgrimage without an object. Of what use could it be to see the world? What pleasure was there in being where I was? Nor could I say to myself that I wished to be anywhere else. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.’ Such was the effect this evening of suddenly finding one’s self alone.

As I re-entered the hotel, some two hours later, its sixty German inmates were sitting down to a solid supper. At one o’clock I had seen them acquitting themselves like Germans in quelling the sacred rage of appetite: but now at six o’clock it had to be quelled again. No wonder that they were disposed to give the Tarasp waters a trial. The only thing to wonder at would have been that they had been made any the better by drinking them. I stood quite alone in being content, instead of the solid supper, with ‘a complete coffee.’ Probably some of the sixty thought me too far gone, or too poor a creature, for the waters to benefit.

Of course the Engadin is everywhere good. Here at Vulpera the mountains are bold and varied. One of the nearest—it is the one just before you as you stand at the door of the Belvidere—has a grand summit of massive jagged rock. Equal merit cannot be predicated of its climate at all times, or at any time for long together. In its three months of cold, the annual supplement to its nine months of winter, the south wind brings rain and snow, and the north wind brings frosty mornings, and disagreeably chilly evenings. So had it been this morning; and so was it now this evening: there was no sitting, or loitering about out of doors.