The stone chalets in Ticino have their fronts painted pink, and decorated in Italian fashion, with garlands of flowers and symbolical vases, pouring out wine and milk. The finest of these houses are not ducal palaces, the poorest are never hovels. A real Swiss cottage is as much adapted to Swiss scenery as the Gothic is suited to the holy and sublime feelings of devotion; there is a fitness in the subdued color of the resin from the larch to an association which requires extreme simplicity; the same cottage painted white would be found offensive and obtruding. Near by is the barn, a wooden bridge thrown over the entrance, with a long and gradual ascent, that conducts the wagons loaded with hay to the loft. Some of these are as generous in size and as well built and equipped as the best Pennsylvania barns. It may be that the dwelling, barn, and dairy are all under one roof; but if so, they are separated with a scrupulous regard to neatness. All wastes are corded and covered up outside like so many piles of treasure, to renew the soil when summer comes round. This fumier is the special pride of the peasant, and is frequently an imposing object, arranged in layers, with the straw rolled and platted at the sides; it stands proudly by the roadside and often the ornament of the front yard. Everything is in its place; order reigns by virtue of some natural law. There is a kind of Robinson Crusoe industry about their houses and their little properties; they are perpetually building, repairing, altering, or improving something. Thought and care are day by day bestowed on every bit of ground to secure a sufficiency of the things that will be needed in the long winter. Every plant is treated by itself as though it was a child; every branch pruned, every bed watered, every gourd trained. From hour to hour the changes in the heavens are observed and what they import considered; for they may import a great deal; the time allowed for bringing the little crops to maturity is so short that the loss of sunshine for a few days may cause anxious thought. It is a sight which awakens reflection and touches the heart. There is much of healthy purity prevailing around these cottage homes. Every one, according to his means, endeavors to make the homestead an ornament to the grassy and elm-shadowed wayside. The green rock-strewn turf comes up to the door, and the bench is along the wall outside. Flowers surround and adorn the windows, the luscious clusters of the vine ripen above the porch, and the little violet creeps over the stone steps or hangs in a sunny niche, its flowers gleaming remotely. Nothing can be more charming than the large carnations which often brighten the dark larch or pine-wood chalets, with their glossy red blossoms hanging from the windows and balconies. The pleasant vine-sheltered door seems to hospitably invite the imagination of the passer-by into the sweet domestic interior of this cottage life. And there is about the inner life of these humble homes a something one may almost say of sanctity, which is not so apparent, at all events on the surface of things, in splendid mansions. Their splendor is transmuted money, there is no poetry in it; if hearts are moved by it, it is not in that fashion or to that issue that it touches them. Quite different with these quiet and secluded homes. There every object has a pleasing history. There industry has accumulated its fruits, frugality its comforts, and virtue diffused its contentment. The care that is taken of it tells you how hard it had been to come by. You read in it a little tale of the labor, the self-denial expended on its acquisition; it is a revelation of an inner life which you are the better for contemplating and for sympathizing with. Shut off from the world, untainted by luxury, unstained by avarice mid lonely toil, practising the simple forms of life and faith, maintaining bravely and contentedly a hard struggle in their Alpine glens, these peasants are on better terms with life than many people who are regarded to have made a better bargain. “To watch the corn grow or the blossoms set, to draw hard breath on the ploughshare or spade,” have attractions for them, not accounted for in the meagre train of advantages and comforts they bring, and must be sought in the inspiration of the poet,—
“Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound;
Content to breathe his native air
On his own ground.
Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire;
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.”
Often the cottage is perched on a mountain crag, and the peasant must be sleepless and prompt, for he lies down with danger at his door and must rise to meet it when the moment comes. There is a continual menace of desolation and ruin: