As we were disappointed in the chamois and the maidens, so were we in the Swiss houses. There is everything in them but beauty. They are just about as beautiful as a western grain elevator or a Quaker meeting-house. There is enough timber in them—each stick crossing the other in a most unnecessary way, and there are gables, and dormer windows and all that, but they are put together in a most unsatisfactory way, if beauty is what you are after. They are absolutely shapeless. The roof is burdened with layers of stone to keep it on in the high winds that prevail, and they are invariably weather-beaten, dingy, and altogether unsatisfactory.
OUTSIDE THE CHALET.
In one end of these uncouth dwellings the family reside, and the work is done, and in the other the cattle are stabled, in what in America we use as a barn. The cattle, the pigs and the poultry are all stabled convenient, only a thin wall separating them from the women and children.
It must be confessed that the residence end of the hideous building is kept very clean, and very nicely, for your Swiss housewife is a good one, but the proximity to the stock would not be considered pleasant in any other country. They cannot plead lack of land for thus crowding together, for these mountains are immense, and very sparsely settled. It is so arranged probably for convenience.
Inasmuch as the traveler through Switzerland is always disappointed in the matter of chamois, picturesquely clad and pretty girls and Swiss chalets, I insist that the government should furnish them. It is a matter for national action. The government should breed chamois, and train them to skip from crag to crag, it should maintain a force of chamois hunters, such as we see in pictures and at the theater, to hunt them, and it should have pretty girls dressed as we were led to expect to see them, at regular intervals, even if it should import them from Paris, and it should build on each Alpine pass at least a dozen chalets of the regulation style.