be a little trying to the patience
in the course of months; but to this is added, by the heaped mantle of
the snow, an almost utter absence of detail and an almost unbroken
identity of colour. Snow, it is true, is not merely white. The sun
touches it with roseate and golden lights. Its own crushed infinity of
crystals, its own richness of tiny sculpture, fills it, when regarded
near at hand, with wonderful depths of coloured shadow, and, though
wintrily transformed, it is still water, and has watery tones of blue.
But, when all is said, these fields of white and blots of crude black
forest are but a trite and staring substitute for the infinite variety
and pleasantness of the earth's face. Even a boulder, whose front is too
precipitous to have retained the snow, seems, if you come upon it in
your walk, a perfect gem of colour, reminds you almost painfully of
other places, and brings into your head the delights of more Arcadian
days--the path across the meadow, the hazel dell, the lilies on the
stream, and the scents, the colours, and the whisper of the woods. And
scents here are as rare as colours. Unless you get a gust of kitchen in
passing some hotel, you shall smell nothing all day long but the faint
and choking odour of frost. Sounds, too, are absent: not a bird pipes,
not a bough waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes
by, the sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through
to no other accompaniment but the crunching of your steps upon the
frozen snow.

It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each one village from one
end to the other. Go where you please, houses will still be in sight,
before and behind you, and to the right and left. Climb as high as an
invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations nested in the
wood. Nor is that all; for about the health resort the walks are
besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids about their
shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys trying to learn to joedel, and
by German couples silently and, as you venture to fancy, not quite
happily, pursuing love's young dream. You may perhaps be an invalid who
likes to make bad verses as he walks about. Alas! no muse will suffer
this imminence of interruption--and at the second stampede of joedellers
you find your modest inspiration fled. Or you may only have a taste for
solitude; it may try your nerves to have some one always in front whom
you are visibly overtaking, and some