HAY-MAKING.
UPON THE HEIGHTS.
As we returned from Grindelwald to Interlaken, we often paused to note the peasants toiling in the fields. So far as their appearance was concerned, we might have supposed them laborers on a Vermont farm; but their low carts were quite unlike our country hayracks; and the appearance of a single ox, harnessed with ropes around his horns, presented an amusing contrast to the sturdy beasts which, bound together by the yoke, drag to our barns their loads of fragrant hay. Women, of course, were working with the men; but female laborers in Switzerland are not in the majority. In many instances the ratio is but one to three.
A SWISS FARM-HOUSE.
These peasants look up curiously as we drive along, and no doubt think that we are favored beings, to whom our luxuries give perfect happiness. And yet the very tourists whom they thus envy may, in a single hour, endure more misery and heartache than they in their simplicity and moderate poverty will ever know. Among these people are not found the framers of those hopeless questions: "Is life worth living?" and "Does death end all?" The real destroyers of life's happiness are not a lowly home and manual labor. They are the constant worriments and cares of artificial life,—satiety of pleasures, the overwork of mental powers, and the disenchantment of satisfied desires.