His clothes are worn threadbare; and he looks as thin and poor as a Methodist minister in a stony town at home, on three hundred a year.  He politely returns our salutation, and we walk on.  Nearly all the priests in this region look wretchedly poor,—­as poor as the people.  Through crooked, narrow streets, with houses overhanging and thrusting out corners and gables, houses with stables below, and quaint carvings and odd little windows above, the panes of glass hexagons, so that the windows looked like sections of honey-comb,—­we found our way to the inn, a many-storied chalet, with stairs on the outside, stone floors in the upper passages, and no end of queer rooms; built right in the midst of other houses as odd, decorated with German-text carving, from the windows of which the occupants could look in upon us, if they had cared to do so; but they did not.  They seem little interested in anything; and no wonder, with their hard fight with Nature.  Below is a wine-shop, with a little side booth, in which some German travelers sit drinking their wine, and sputtering away in harsh gutturals.  The inn is very neat inside, and we are well served.  Stalden is high; but away above it on the opposite side is a village on the steep slope, with a slender white spire that rivals some of the snowy needles.  Stalden is high, but the hill on which it stands is rich in grass.  The secret of the fertile meadows is the most thorough irrigation.  Water is carried along the banks from the river, and distributed by numerous sluiceways below; and above, the little mountain streams are brought where they are needed by artificial channels.  Old men and women in the fields were constantly changing the direction of the currents.  All the inhabitants appeared to be porters:  women were transporting on their backs baskets full of soil; hay was being backed to the stables; burden-bearers were coming and going upon the road:  we were told that there are only three horses in the place.  There is a pleasant girl who brings us luncheon at the inn; but the inhabitants for the most part are as hideous as those we see all day:  some have hardly the shape of human beings, and they all live in the most filthy manner in the dirtiest habitations.  A chalet is a sweet thing when you buy a little model of it at home.

After we leave Stalden, the walk becomes more picturesque, the precipices are higher, the gorges deeper.  It required some engineering to carry the footpath round the mountain buttresses and over the ravines.  Soon the village of Emd appears on the right,—­a very considerable collection of brown houses, and a shining white church-spire, above woods and precipices and apparently unscalable heights, on a green spot which seems painted on the precipices; with nothing visible to keep the whole from sliding down, down, into the gorge of the Visp.  Switzerland may not have so much population to the square mile as some countries; but she has a population to some of her