hile, overhead, if the weather be rightly characteristic of the
place, the sky fades towards night through a surprising key of colours.
The latest gold leaps from the last mountain. Soon, perhaps, the moon
shall rise, and in her gentler light the valley shall be mellowed and
misted, and here and there a wisp of silver cloud upon a hilltop, and
here and there a warmly glowing window in a house, between fire and
starlight, kind and homely in the fields of snow.

But the valley is not seated so high among the clouds to be eternally
exempt from changes. The clouds gather, black as ink; the wind bursts
rudely in; day after day the mists drive overhead, the snowflakes
flutter down in blinding disarray; daily the mail comes in later from
the top of the pass; people peer through their windows and foresee no
end but an entire seclusion from Europe, and death by gradual dry-rot,
each in his indifferent inn; and when at last the storm goes and the sun
comes again, behold a world of unpolluted snow, glossy like fur, bright
like daylight, a joy to wallowing dogs and cheerful to the souls of men.
Or perhaps from across storied and malarious Italy, a wind cunningly
winds about the mountains and breaks, warm and unclean, upon our
mountain valley. Every nerve is set ajar; the conscience recognises, at
a gust, a load of sins and negligences hitherto unknown; and the whole
invalid world huddles into its private chambers, and silently recognises
the empire of the Foehn.

III

ALPINE DIVERSIONS

There will be no lack of diversion in an Alpine sanatorium. The place is
half English, to be sure, the local sheet appearing in double column,
text and translation; but it still remains half German; and hence we
have a band which is able to play, and a company of actors able, as you
will be told, to act. This last you will take on trust, for the players,
unlike the local sheet, confine themselves to German; and though at the
beginning of winter they come with their wig-boxes to each hotel in
turn, long before Christmas they will have given up the English for a
bad job. There will follow, perhaps, a skirmish between the two races;
the German element seeking, in the interest of their actors, to raise a
mysterious item, the _Kur-taxe_, which figures heavily enough already
in the weekly bills, the English element stoutly resisting. Meantime in
the English hotels home-played farces, _tableaux-vivants_, and even
balls enliven the evenings; a c