its shady margin, its resting places
hidden among the branches, its chalet-restaurant, from the terrace of
which one overlooks the whole valley; and it would be difficult to find
near St. Moritz a more interesting spot.

We meet at every step parties of English ladies, looking like
plantations of umbrellas with their covers on and surmounted by immense
straw hats; then there are German ladies, massive as citadels, but
not impregnable, asking nothing better than to surrender to the young
exquisites, with the figure of cuirassiers, who accompany them; further
on, lively Italian ladies parade themselves in dresses of the carnival,
the colors outrageously striking and dazzling to the eyes; with
up-turned skirts they cross the Inn on great mossy stones, leaping
with the grace of birds, and smiling, to show, into the bargain, the
whiteness of their teeth. All this crowd passing in procession before us
is composed of men and women of every age and condition; some with the
grave face of a waxen saint, others beaming with the satisfied smile of
rich people; there are also invalids, who go along hobbling and limping,
or who are drawn, in little carriages.

Soon handsome facades, pierced with hundreds of windows, show themselves
in the grand and severe setting of mountains and glaciers. It is St.
Moritz-les-Bains. Here every house is a hotel, and, as every hotel is
a little palace, we do not alight from the diligence; we go a little
farther and a little higher, to St. Moritz-le-Village, which has a much
more beautiful situation. It is at the top of a little hill, whose sides
slope down to a pretty lake, fresh and green as a lawn. The eye reaches
beyond Sils, the whole length of the valley, with its mountains like
embattled ramparts, its lakes like a great row of pearls, and its
glaciers showing their piles of snowy white against the azure depths of
the horizon.

St. Moritz is the center of the valley of the Upper Engadine, which
extends to the length of eighteen or nineteen leagues, and which
scarcely possesses a thousand inhabitants. Almost all the men emigrate
to work for strangers, like their brothers, the mountaineers of Savoy
and Auvergne, and do not return till they have amassed a sufficient
fortune to allow them to build a little white house, with gilded
window frames, and to die quietly in the spot where they were born....
Historians tell us that the first inhabitants of the Upper Engadine were
Etruscans and Latins chas