to dense, rounded clouds, touched with silver on their upper
edges. They hung over the lake, rolling into every bay and spreading
from shore to shore, so that not a gleam of water was visible; but over
their heaving and tossing silence rose, far away, the mountains of the
four German states beyond the lake. An Alp in Vorarlberg made a shining
island in the sky. The postilion was loud in his regrets, yet I thought
the picture best as it was. On the right lay the land of Appenzell,--not
a table-land, but a region of mountain ridge and summit, of valley and
deep, dark gorge, green as emerald up to the line of snow, and so
thickly studded with dwellings, grouped or isolated, that there seemed
to be one scattered village as far as the eye could reach. To the south,
over forests of fir, the Sentis lifted his huge towers of rock, crowned
with white, wintry pyramids.

"Here, where we are," said the postilion, "was the first battle; but
there was another, two years afterwards, over there, the other side of
Trogen, where the road goes down to the Rhine. Stoss is the place, and
there's a chapel built on the very spot. Duke Frederick of Austria came
to help the Abbot Kuno, and the Appenzellers were only one to ten
against them. It was a great fight, they say, and the women helped,--not
with pikes and guns, but in this way: they put on white shirts, and came
out of the woods, above where the fighting was going on. Now, when the
Austrians and the Abbot's people saw them, they thought there were
spirits helping the Appenzellers, (the women were all white, you see,
and too far off to show plainly,) and so they gave up the fight, after
losing nine hundred knights and troopers. After that, it was ordered
that the women should go first to the sacrament, so that no man might
forget the help they gave in that battle. And the people go every year
to the chapel, on the same day when it took place."

I looked, involuntarily, to find some difference in the population after
passing the frontier. But I had not counted upon the levelling influence
which the same kind of labor exercises, whether upon mountain or in
valley. So long as Appenzell was a land of herdsmen, many peculiarities
of costume, features, and manners must have remained. For a long time,
however, Outer-Rhoden, as this part of the Canton is called, shares with
that part of St. Gall which lies below it the manufacture of fine
muslins and embroideries. There are looms in almost every