The women are either misses of seventeen or mature women of thirty-eight. They have the same outfit of material and differ from the males only in the matter of dress. Everything that savors of femininity is religiously eliminated (even the bustle is sacrificed), heavy underclothing is worn, a most ungraceful skirt, the most barbarous English shoes appear on feet never too small, and their entire hideousness is made painfully visible, inasmuch as the straight skirt never reaches below the ankle.
THE ALPINE GUIDE.
The Alpenstock is a staff perhaps seven feet long, of ash, very stout, with a hook upon one end and a spike in the other.
In this hideous garb, in a stern sort of a way, as though they were leading a forlorn hope and never expected to escape with their lives, but were doing it as a sort of sacrificial duty, they ride out to the foot of the Alps somewhere, as safely and in as much luxury as though they were in rocking chairs in their own homes, and coming to the hotel thereat they purchase another lot of climbing apparatus, and hire all sorts of donkeys and mules and guides, and after a day or so commence the ascent. They go up roads that are so plain as to need no guides, on donkeys or mules, over paths that could be walked as well, and tiring half way up, stop and rest and never go farther, but return, with their mouths full of lies. Every mother’s son and daughter of them claim to have made the full ascent of the peak essayed, and having read themselves up, talk as glibly about it as though they had lived upon the mountains all their lives, and knew every glacier as familiarly as they do their bedrooms.