When we came to the galleries which defend the road from avalanches, we saw ahead of us a train of over forty sledges ascending, all charged with Valtelline wine.  Our postillions drew up at the inner side of the gallery, between massive columns of the purest ice dependent from the rough-hewn roof and walls of rock.  A sort of open loggia on the farther side framed vignettes of the Valtelline mountains in their hard cerulean shadows and keen sunlight.  Between us and the view defiled the wine-sledges; and as each went by, the men made us drink out of their trinketti.  These are oblong, hexagonal wooden kegs, holding about fourteen litres, which the carter fills with wine before he leaves the Valtelline, to cheer him on the homeward journey.  You raise it in both hands, and when the bung has been removed, allow the liquor to flow stream-wise down your throat.  It was a most extraordinary Bacchic procession—­a pomp which, though undreamed of on the banks of the Ilissus, proclaimed the deity of Dionysos in authentic fashion.  Struggling horses, grappling at the ice-bound floor with sharp-spiked shoes; huge, hoarse drivers, some clad in sheepskins from Italian valleys, some brown as bears in rough Graubuenden homespun; casks, dropping their spilth of red wine on the snow; greetings, embracings; patois of Bergamo, Romansch, and German roaring around the low-browed vaults and tingling ice pillars; pourings forth of libations of the new strong Valtelline on breasts and beards;—­the whole made up a scene of stalwart jollity and manful labour such as I have nowhere else in such wild circumstances witnessed.  Many Davosers were there, the men of Andreas Gredig, Valaer, and so forth; and all of these, on greeting Christian, forced us to drain a Schluck from their unmanageable cruses.  Then on they went, crying, creaking, struggling, straining through the corridor, which echoed deafeningly, the gleaming crystals of those hard Italian mountains in their winter raiment building a background of still beauty to the savage Bacchanalian riot of the team.

How little the visitors who drink Valtelline wine at S. Moritz or Davos reflect by what strange ways it reaches them.  A sledge can scarcely be laden with more than one cask of 300 litres on the ascent; and this cask, according to the state of the road, has many times to be shifted from wheels to runners and back again before the journey is accomplished.  One carter will take charge of two horses, and consequently of two sledges and two casks, driving them both by voice and gesture rather than by rein.  When they leave the Valtelline, the carters endeavour, as far as possible, to take the pass in gangs, lest bad weather or an accident upon the road should overtake them singly.  At night they hardly rest three hours, and rarely think of sleeping, but spend the time in drinking and conversation.  The horses are fed and littered; but for them too the night-halt is little better than a baiting-time.