We meet at every step parties of English ladies, looking like plantations of umbrellas with their covers on and surmounted by immense straw hats; then there are German ladies, massive as citadels, but not impregnable, asking nothing better than to surrender to the young exquisites, with the figure of cuirassiers, who accompany them; further on, lively Italian ladies parade themselves in dresses of the carnival, the colors outrageously striking and dazzling to the eyes; with up-turned skirts they cross the Inn on great mossy stones, leaping with the grace of birds, and smiling, to show, into the bargain, the whiteness of their teeth.  All this crowd passing in procession before us is composed of men and women of every age and condition; some with the grave face of a waxen saint, others beaming with the satisfied smile of rich people; there are also invalids, who go along hobbling and limping, or who are drawn, in little carriages.

Soon handsome facades, pierced with hundreds of windows, show themselves in the grand and severe setting of mountains and glaciers.  It is St. Moritz-les-Bains.  Here every house is a hotel, and, as every hotel is a little palace, we do not alight from the diligence; we go a little farther and a little higher, to St. Moritz-le-Village, which has a much more beautiful situation.  It is at the top of a little hill, whose sides slope down to a pretty lake, fresh and green as a lawn.  The eye reaches beyond Sils, the whole length of the valley, with its mountains like embattled ramparts, its lakes like a great row of pearls, and its glaciers showing their piles of snowy white against the azure depths of the horizon.

St. Moritz is the center of the valley of the Upper Engadine, which extends to the length of eighteen or nineteen leagues, and which scarcely possesses a thousand inhabitants.  Almost all the men emigrate to work for strangers, like their brothers, the mountaineers of Savoy and Auvergne, and do not return till they have amassed a sufficient fortune to allow them to build a little white house, with gilded window frames, and to die quietly in the spot where they were born....  Historians tell us that the first inhabitants of the Upper Engadine were Etruscans and Latins chased from Italy by the Gauls and Carthaginians, and taking refuge in these hidden altitudes.  After the fall of the Empire, the inhabitants of the Engadine fell under the dominion of the Franks and Lombards, then the Dukes of Swabia; but the blood never mingled—­the type remained Italian; black hair, the quick eye, the mobile countenance, the expressive features, and the supple figure.

GENEVA[41]

BY FRANCIS H. GRIBBLE