Francis Sabie, Pan’s Pipe.
WITH TWENTY-SIX REPRODUCTIONS
OF WATER-COLOUR DRAWINGS
London :: :: HUTCHINSON & CO.
Paternoster Row :: :: :: 1911
TO
MADEMOISELLE MARTHE DEDIE
AND ALL AT
“LA COMBE,” ROLLE (VAUD)
PREFACE
Last year Mr. G. Flemwell gave us a very beautiful volume upon the Alpine Flora, and it has met with well-deserved success. But the author is not yet satisfied. He thinks to do better, and would now make known other pictures—those of Alpine fields, especially during the spring months.
Springtime in our Alps is certainly the most beautiful moment of the year, and the months of May and June, even to the middle of July, are the most brilliant of all. It is a season which, up to the present, we have rather considered as reserved for us Swiss, who do not much like that which is somewhat irreverently called l’industrie des étrangers, and perhaps we shall not be altogether enchanted to find that the author à la mode is about to draw the veil from our secrets, open the lock-gates of our most sacred joys to the international flood, and sound the clarion to make known, urbe et orbi, the springtime glory of our fields. With this one little reservation to calm the egotistical anxiety which is in me (Mr. Flemwell, who is my colleague in the Swiss Alpine Club, knows too well our national character not to understand the spirit in which we make certain reservations with regard to this invasion of our mountains by the cosmopolitan crowd), I wish to thank the author, and to compliment him upon this fresh monument which he raises to the glory of our flowers.