Italiam petimus! We have climbed the valley of the Julier, following its green, transparent torrent.  A night has come and gone at Muehlen.  The stream still leads us up, diminishing in volume as we rise, up through the fleecy mists that roll asunder for the sun, disclosing far-off snowy ridges and blocks of granite mountains.  The lifeless, soundless waste of rock, where only thin winds whistle out of silence and fade suddenly into still air, is passed.  Then comes the descent, with its forests of larch and cembra, golden and dark green upon a ground of grey, and in front the serried shafts of the Bernina, and here and there a glimpse of emerald lake at turnings of the road.  Autumn is the season for this landscape.  Through the fading of innumerable leaflets, the yellowing of larches, and something vaporous in the low sun, it gains a colour not unlike that of the lands we seek.  By the side of the lake at Silvaplana the light was strong and warm, but mellow.  Pearly clouds hung over the Maloja, and floating overhead cast shadows on the opaque water, which may literally be compared to chrysoprase.  The breadth of golden, brown, and russet tints upon the valley at this moment adds softness to its lines of level strength.  Devotees of the Engadine contend that it possesses an austere charm beyond the common beauty of Swiss landscape; but this charm is only perfected in autumn.  The fresh snow on the heights that guard it helps.  And then there are the forests of dark pines upon those many knolls and undulating mountain-flanks beside the lakes.  Sitting and dreaming there in noonday sun, I kept repeating to myself Italiam petimus!

A hurricane blew upward from the pass as we left Silvaplana, ruffling the lake with gusts of the Italian wind.  By Silz Maria we came in sight of a dozen Italian workmen, arm linked in arm in two rows, tramping in rhythmic stride, and singing as they went.  Two of them were such nobly built young men, that for a moment the beauty of the landscape faded from my sight, and I was saddened.  They moved to their singing, like some of Mason’s or Frederick Walker’s figures, with the free grace of living statues, and laughed as we drove by.  And yet, with all their beauty, industry, sobriety, intelligence, these Italians of the northern valleys serve the sterner people of the Grisons like negroes, doing their roughest work at scanty wages.

So we came to the vast Alpine wall, and stood on a bare granite slab, and looked over into Italy, as men might lean from the battlements of a fortress.  Behind lies the Alpine valley, grim, declining slowly northward, with wind-lashed lakes and glaciers sprawling from storm-broken pyramids of gneiss.  Below spread the unfathomable depths that lead to Lombardy, flooded with sunlight, filled with swirling vapour, but never wholly hidden from our sight.  For the blast kept shifting the cloud-masses, and the sun streamed through in spears and bands of sheeny rays.  Over the