street of the little city is
heard a speech, and in the valleys and from the hillsides echo
herdsmen's songs, which contain Latin and French words, Greek, Saracen
and German, a patois holding in solution the long story of the past.

GRUYERE

CHAPTER I

ORIGIN OF THE PEOPLE

Triply woven of the French, German and Italian races, the Swiss nation
discovers in its Romand or French strain another triple weave of
Celtic-Romand-Burgundian descent.

While the high mountainous regions of eastern Switzerland were early
scaled and settled by the Germanic tribes, the western were still
earlier inhabited by the ancient Celtic-Helvetians and then civilized
and cultivated by the most luxurious of Roman colonies. Resisting first
and then happily mingling with their Roman conquerors, the Celtic people
were transformed into a Romand race, similar in speech and origin to the
French. In the heart of this Romand country was an ancient principality
where the essential qualities of the beauty loving and imaginative
races, Roman and Celtic, expressed themselves uniquely. A fountain of
Celtic song and legend, a centre of chivalry and warlike power, this
principality is known only to the outer world by the pastoral product
which bears its name "Gruyere."

Remarkable in the interest of the unbroken line of its valorous and
lovable princes, and in the precious and enchanting race mixture of its
brave, laughter-loving people, its supreme historical interest lies in
its little recorded and astonishing political significance among the
independent feudal principalities of Europe.

When the Teuton barbarians came to devastate the enchanting loveliness
of the templed Roman garden which was Switzerland for three idyllic
centuries, they stopped at last at the penultimate peaks of the
Occidental Alps, at a certain region called _aux fenils_ (_ad fines_),
where a glacial stream rushes across the narrow valley of the Griesbach,
among the southern mountains of the Bernese Oberland. Thus western or
Romand Switzerland preserves a character definitely apart from the
eastern, and this barrier across the Bernese valley, unpassed for a
thousand years, still divides the German from the Romand speaking
peasantry. To the north and west lies Gruyere, greenest of pastoral
countries, uniquely set in a ring of azure heights, where like a lost
Provence, the Romand spirit has preserved its eternal youthfulness and
charm. Greatly loved by all the Swiss