We also intended to visit the Schnepfenstrich, a piece of forest between Bludesch and Nenzing where, in days gone by, one used to lie in wait for the woodcock at nightfall. What excitement in the dim gloaming of March—Oculi: da kommen sie—among those patches of trees with their scent of dampness and sprouting leaves, listening for the call of the male bird and waiting to see him glide past, mysterious as a phantom! That was sport worthy of the name; though I now find it not altogether easy to conjure up the first fine rapture of that bird-massacring epoch. How unimaginative—unpoetic, let us say—are the English, who put up this apparition of the twilight in the vulgarest fashion with a dog, and then slaughter him as if he were nothing but a pheasant or partridge! Such is our manner. It is the same with the capercailzie, a stupid, worthless fowl—and worse than worthless: is he not supplanting the finer black game? Why not ennoble him in death, at least? Why not approach stealthily in the chill dusk of dawn, and espy him at last, drunk with passion, on his favorite fir? Then, if you can aim straight, he dies as we may all desire to die—swiftly, painlessly, and like a lover in his highest moment of exaltation. I know what Englishmen will say to this. They will say something about cruelty and breeding-season. Your Anglo-Saxon is always worth listening to, when he talks about cruel sports.

We had intended, I say; but those pests of horse-flies, which Mr. R. insists upon calling “fly-horses” or “flyses-horse,” became worse and worse. There must have been cattle in this wood, not long ago. At last, despite clouds of tobacco-smoke, they drove us fairly out into the fields, and not long afterwards we found ourselves on the banks of the “Feldbächle,” a cheery streamlet whose course, from start to finish, has approximately the shape of a horse-shoe or, better still, of a capital letter U, resting on its left flank. It rises in a copious and frigid fountain, soon to be visited, on the uplands behind our village, flows east through a charming swamp region, feeds the two reservoirs, tumbles downhill in a spectacular fall—the cataract whose water-power tempted my paternal grandfather to establish his cotton-mills on this spot, and which is therefore the causa causans of my presence here at this moment—babbles fussily through the village, and there turns westwards through these fields, to merge itself into the Tabalada stream lower down. A short but lively career.[6]

Sometimes, in dry weather, this rivulet is blocked and allowed to flow over the parched plain. My first memory of it dates from such an occasion. There were puddles in the stream-bed here and there, puddles full of trout; and a number of Italian workmen—we employed a good many Italians at the factories—were catching these trout with their hands and eating them alive, as if they were apples. A disgusting sight, now I come to think of it.

A little later in life, I remember, and on a scorching summer afternoon, my sister and I bolted into these fields from the house, presumably after butterflies. How the sun blazed; how hot and sticky we were! And here was the old Feldbächle full of water, gadding along in its usual brisk style. An idea occurred to her. What about walking into it, clothes and all? Then, at last, we should be cool again. No; not paddle about the water like anybody else, but get right in, get properly in, in up to the neck, and lie down there as if we were in bed. A great joke. It was only on scrambling out again that we began to wonder what would happen at home and what, in fact, might be the correct thing to do under the circumstances. The problem was solved by an uphill march along the petrifying brook to far above the needful level, a flank movement eastwards in the rear of our own house, followed by a rapid descent into that of our friend the gardener who, with his usual ingenuity, lighted an immense fire at which our scanty summer garments were dried, one by one.

Those old cotton-mills of ours at the foot of the cataract of which I spoke are an ugly blot on the landscape; an eyesore, none the less, which I can view without resentment, since, indirectly, I owe existence to them and would not have missed the enjoyment of this life for anything, nor would I exchange it even now for that of any other creature on earth.

The paternal grandfather who built and worked them almost to the day of his death must have been a man of uncommon grit. I know little about him. A mass of family documents full of the requisite information, as well as other papers interesting to myself, were lost in one of those accidents which occur to everybody now and then; a trunk was broken open on a journey, the clothes stolen and these letters and things scattered or thrown away by the thieves. Small comfort to receive insurance money for the clothes! I would have preferred the papers which are now lost for ever.

I cannot even say when this business was founded. It may have been in the late thirties, for he died October, 1870, aged sixty-six, at Banchory, N. B., where he ought to have died, and there lies entombed in our vault. His object in thus exiling himself and family for a whole lifetime was to earn enough money to pay back some heavy mortgages on his ancestral estate, for which he had an idolatrous affection. This much I happen to know: that in 1856 already, by working these mills, he was able to repay £36,000 towards the cost of them, and £24,000 towards redeeming the mortgages. So he set himself to his grim task; and a grim task it must have been to master the immense technical and commercial details of such an undertaking, and all in a foreign language; to import (among other little difficulties) every scrap of machinery from Lancashire with no railway nearer, I fancy, than Zurich. He worked with single aim and lived to reap his reward, although the losses due to the American Civil War, and the Austro-German one, were such that the whole enterprise nearly came to grief.[7]

His portrait in old age, engraved from a photograph on one of those shell-cameos which used to be fashionable, wears an air of clean-cut, thoughtful determination. They told me of his effective way with beggars. “Work!” he would say, whenever one of them turned up with his usual tale of misery. “Work! I also work.” The other, naturally enough, professed himself quite unable to find any work. Whereupon, to the beggar’s intense disgust, he promptly found it for him. These gentlemen learnt to avoid our house in his day. I also gathered that his favorite ode of Horace was “Integer vitæ.” That sounds characteristic. My own fancy leans towards the Lady of Antium....

His eldest son carried on the business, and to him, with his love of mountaineering and multiple other activities, it must have been irksome in the extreme to sit in that office. He also stuck it out, but died young and, from all accounts, the best-loved man in the province, despite his Lutheran faith. Having occasion, during my last visit to Bregenz, to mention my name to an unknown shopkeeper who was to send me a parcel, I was pleased to hear him say “Your name, dear sir, is eternal in this country.” It is doubtless gratifying to find yourself in a district where your family is held in honor. One must try, however, not to take these things too melodramatically. We live but once; we owe nothing to posterity; and a man’s own happiness counts before that of any one else. My father’s tastes happen to have lain in a direction which commended him to his fellows. Had his nature driven him along lines that failed to secure their sympathy, or even their approval, I should have been the last to complain. The world is wide! Instead of coming here, one would have gone somewhere else.