winter. It has a bad
reputation for the fury of invading storms, when falling snow
hurtles together with snow scooped from the drifts in eddies, and the
weltering white sea shifts at the will of whirlwinds. The Hospice then
may be tenanted for days together by weather-bound wayfarers; and a
line drawn close beneath its roof shows how two years ago the whole
building was buried in one snow-shroud. This morning we lounged about
the door, while our horses rested and postillions and carters pledged
one another in cups of new Veltliner.

The road takes an awful and sudden dive downwards, quite irrespective
of the carefully engineered post-track. At this season the path is
badly broken into ruts and chasms by the wine traffic. In some places
it was indubitably perilous: a narrow ledge of mere ice skirting
thinly clad hard-frozen banks of snow, which fell precipitately
sideways for hundreds of sheer feet. We did not slip over this
parapet, though we were often within an inch of doing so. Had our
horse stumbled, it is not probable that I should have been writing
this.

When we came to the galleries which defend the road from avalanches,
we saw ahead of us a train of over forty sledges ascending, all
charged with Valtelline wine. Our postillions drew up at the inner
side of the gallery, between massive columns of the purest ice
dependent from the rough-hewn roof and walls of rock. A sort of open
_loggia_ on the farther side framed vignettes of the Valtelline
mountains in their hard cerulean shadows and keen sunlight. Between
us and the view defiled the wine-sledges; and as each went by, the
men made us drink out of their _trinketti_. These are oblong,
hexagonal wooden kegs, holding about fourteen litres, which the carter
fills with wine before he leaves the Valtelline, to cheer him on the
homeward journey. You raise it in both hands, and when the bung has
been removed, allow the liquor to flow stream-wise down your throat.
It was a most extraordinary Bacchic procession--a pomp which, though
undreamed of on the banks of the Ilissus, proclaimed the deity of
Dionysos in authentic fashion. Struggling horses, grappling at the
ice-bound floor with sharp-spiked shoes; huge, hoarse drivers, some
clad in sheepskins from Italian valleys, some brown as bears in rough
Graubuenden homespun; casks, dropping their spilth of red wine on the
snow; greetings, embracings; patois of Bergamo, Romansch, and German
roaring around the low-browed va