and taste may
be suited in your neighbourhood. But perhaps the true way to toboggan is
alone and at night. First comes the tedious climb, dragging your
instrument behind you. Next a long breathing-space, alone with snow and
pine-woods, cold, silent, and solemn to the heart. Then you push off;
the toboggan fetches away; she begins to feel the hill, to glide, to
swim, to gallop. In a breath you are out from under the pine-trees, and
a whole heavenful of stars reels and flashes overhead. Then comes a
vicious effort; for by this time your wooden steed is speeding like the
wind, and you are spinning round a corner, and the whole glittering
valley and all the lights in all the great hotels lie for a moment at
your feet; and the next you are racing once more in the shadow of the
night with close-shut teeth and beating heart. Yet a little while and
you will be landed on the high-road by the door of your own hotel. This,
in an atmosphere tingling with forty degrees of frost, in a night made
luminous with stars and snow, and girt with strange white mountains,
teaches the pulse an unaccustomed tune and adds a new excitement to the
life of man upon his planet.

IV

THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS

To any one who should come from a southern sanatorium to the Alps, the
row of sun-burned faces round the table would present the first
surprise. He would begin by looking for the invalids, and he would lose
his pains, for not one out of five of even the bad cases bears the mark
of sickness on his face. The plump sunshine from above and its strong
reverberation from below colour the skin like an Indian climate; the
treatment, which consists mainly of the open air, exposes even the
sickliest to tan, and a tableful of invalids comes, in a month or two,
to resemble a tableful of hunters. But although he may be thus surprised
at the first glance, his astonishment will grow greater, as he
experiences the effects of the climate on himself. In many ways it is a
trying business to reside upon the Alps: the stomach is exercised, the
appetite often languishes; the liver may at times rebel; and because you
have come so far from metropolitan advantages, it does not follow that
you shall recover. But one thing is undeniable--that in the rare air,
clear, cold, and blinding light of Alpine winters, a man takes a certain
troubled delight in his existence which can nowhere else be paralleled.
He is perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly alive. It