An English gentleman who had lived some years in this region, said it was the cradle of compulsory education.  But he said that the English idea that compulsory education would reduce bastardy and intemperance was an error—­it has not that effect.  He said there was more seduction in the Protestant than in the Catholic cantons, because the confessional protected the girls.  I wonder why it doesn’t protect married women in France and Spain?

This gentleman said that among the poorer peasants in the Valais, it was common for the brothers in a family to cast lots to determine which of them should have the coveted privilege of marrying, and his brethren—­doomed bachelors—­heroically banded themselves together to help support the new family.

We left Zermatt in a wagon—­and in a rain-storm, too —­for St. Nicholas about ten o’clock one morning.  Again we passed between those grass-clad prodigious cliffs, specked with wee dwellings peeping over at us from velvety green walls ten and twelve hundred feet high.  It did not seem possible that the imaginary chamois even could climb those precipices.  Lovers on opposite cliffs probably kiss through a spy-glass, and correspond with a rifle.

In Switzerland the farmer’s plow is a wide shovel, which scrapes up and turns over the thin earthy skin of his native rock—­and there the man of the plow is a hero.  Now here, by our St. Nicholas road, was a grave, and it had a tragic story.  A plowman was skinning his farm one morning—­not the steepest part of it, but still a steep part—­that is, he was not skinning the front of his farm, but the roof of it, near the eaves—­when he absent-mindedly let go of the plow-handles to moisten his hands, in the usual way; he lost his balance and fell out of his farm backward; poor fellow, he never touched anything till he struck bottom, fifteen hundred feet below. [1] We throw a halo of heroism around the life of the soldier and the sailor, because of the deadly dangers they are facing all the time.  But we are not used to looking upon farming as a heroic occupation.  This is because we have not lived in Switzerland.

1.  This was on a Sunday.—­M.T.

From St. Nicholas we struck out for Visp—­or Vispach—­on foot.  The rain-storms had been at work during several days, and had done a deal of damage in Switzerland and Savoy.  We came to one place where a stream had changed its course and plunged down a mountain in a new place, sweeping everything before it.  Two poor but precious farms by the roadside were ruined.  One was washed clear away, and the bed-rock exposed; the other was buried out of sight under a tumbled chaos of rocks, gravel, mud, and rubbish.  The resistless might of water was well exemplified.  Some saplings which had stood in the way were bent to the ground, stripped clean of their bark, and buried under rocky debris.  The road had been swept away, too.