TAKING THE CATTLE TO THE MOUNTAINS.
There being no chamois, it follows, as a matter of course, that there are no Alpine hunters after them, for the Alpine Swiss don’t go about posing in picturesque garments for the benefit of tourists. Not he. He keeps himself busy in his shop, making carvings of wood, which he sells to the tourists, and he isn’t picturesque either. He wears shocking bad clothes, just about the same that poor people wear the world over, and poverty is scarcely ever picturesque.
The smiling Swiss maiden is also a myth. Those we met on the roads were anything but pretty, anything but smiling, and anything but pleasant to look at. They were, as a rule, short, dumpy young ladies, with either bare feet or feet in wooden shoes, carrying enormous loads, their mothers following them, also carrying a heavy load of grass or wood, and she and the mother were generally ornamented with immense goitres which hung down from their necks in particularly disagreeable prominence.
This disease is fearfully prevalent in these mountains, almost every other woman of age having it. I don’t remember seeing a man with it, nor a very young woman, but it is almost the rule in some sections, in women of forty and over.
Physicians do not pretend to cure it, and so it hangs and grows, and the neck swells and swells, till the goitre becomes an immense bag.
It is a singular dispensation. Why should it be the exclusive property of women? It doesn’t make much difference how a man looks, and the Swiss women, worked to death as they are, have little enough beauty at best, and with all these disadvantages to hang a goitre upon their necks is burdening them a trifle too much. Still, so much do they love their mountains, that they would stay among them if their necks should enlarge to the degree of requiring wheelbarrows to carry them comfortably.
The Swiss chalet is another disappointment. We expected to see the mountains dotted all over with those beautiful houses, all gables and dormer windows, picturesquely painted in all sorts of gay colors, such as we see in the theaters.
Such a house with a pretty peasant girl in short dress, with gay colored stockings, and a simple but very sweet broad straw hat, and a few dozens of chamois leaping from crag to crag, would make a very pretty picture and one worth going a long way to see.
THE SWISS COTTAGE.