A SHORT drive over one of those wonderfully hard, smooth roads that make carriage traveling in Switzerland so delightful, and we are at the hotel at the Gorge du Trient, whence, early in the morning, we are to begin the ascent of the mountains. The time before dinner is occupied in an exploration of the wildly picturesque gorge, with its winding foot-bridge built alongside the cliffs, over yawning chasms, around jutting bowlders that rise to such a height that the sky seems like a strip of blue ribbon suspended high above our heads. At the bottom of the gorge a mountain torrent, springing from some unknown nook way up in the mountain, comes rushing and tumbling down over the jagged rocks, foaming and whirling, and dashing its spray high in the air, as it hurries along to join the Rhone.

The slender bridge, at times hanging apparently without any support over deep pools of water, seems too fragile to bear the weight of a person, and one treads lightly, lest the frail structure give way, and he be precipitated into the unfathomable abyss below. The gorge is about three-quarters of a mile long, and is wierdly picturesque.

After dinner, some rash member of the party suggested that we do a little mountain climbing. Then a wager was immediately laid that no one had the courage and endurance to go to the summit of a high peak near by. Of course the challenge was accepted, and the whole party, there were three ladies and five gentlemen, all started to accomplish the easy feat. It looked easy. The path zigzagged up the hill, and

was provided with resting places at stated intervals. Nothing could be more delightful than to skip merrily along, like chamois, clear to the summit. It was all very well for the first few hundred feet, and we laughed and vowed that mountain climbing was not such a terrible affair, after all. But at the first resting place two of the gentlemen and one of the ladies announced that they were subject to heart disease, and dare not go any farther. They could do it, but it was a duty they owed to their families and the world at large not to tempt death.

At the next resting place one of the ladies discovered that she had turned her ankle, and she went back. She danced as briskly as usual, however, at the hotel that evening.

Another of the gentlemen thought it his duty to assist her down to the hotel. This left but three, who silently lifted themselves up step by step to the next resting place. From this the view was something unutterably grand. The valley sweeping out to the lake, the mountains on the other side, with the clouds kissing their summits, the fleecy white, pink-tinged by the setting sun, forming a beautiful contrast to the forbidding black of the rocks, and the dark green of the mountain foliage. One of the gentlemen looked up to the dizzy height still before him, and remarked that he had seen as much grandeur as he could take in at one time, and down hill he went.

The other and last smiled a contemptuous smile as he disappeared on the zigzag path, and setting his teeth, turned his footsteps upward. He reached the summit, and waving a small American flag (which he always carried about his person), took in the wonderful view, and slowly but majestically descended.

I will not say which of the eight persevered and made the ascent. It is a fault, a common fault, in travelers, this boasting of their own achievements, and because one has a command of type and presses I do not see why he should use those facilities to record his own performances. If any one else of the party publishes an account of the excursion I shall see my name in this connection, but never will I write it.

But I—or rather, that is, the one who did persevere to the summit, was rewarded with a sight that amply repaid me—or him—for my, or his labor. There at his feet, bathed in the light of the sinking sun, was the valley of the Rhone, brilliant with its covering of green, relieved by the silvery river meandering through its center. To the right, crossing and cutting off the valley, are the Bernese Alps, their snow-covered peaks glistening in the sunlight. It was a magnificent view, giving us a good idea of the glories of nature that were to be entered upon on the morrow.

When the Gorge du Trient was organized, nature must have been laboring under an attack of cholera morbus.

At some remote period in the history of the earth there was a solid mountain, but some glacier, or earthquake, or other irresistible force, cleft it in twain, and the ever present water, nature’s slow but exceedingly certain worker, poured into the chasm to finish what the first rude force commenced.

There is a great plenty of water stored away in these mountains, and it has been pouring through this rent in the bosom of the earth, wearing away a few feet here and a few feet there, augmenting in volume as the space for it increased, until it has become a wild, resistless torrent, which doesn’t dance, but rushes through the rocks, till after its brief attack of delirium tremens it loses itself in the Rhone and finally in Lake Geneva, and becomes as quiet and well-behaved as you could wish.

The scenic artist who painted “The Devil’s Glen” in the Black Crook, had doubtless visited this gorge. If devils ever came together in convention, and wanted a place, the horrible wildness of which should be absolutely satanic, they could find it here.

The rocks on either hand are nearly five hundred feet high, and the ravine twists and turns in every direction, the sides approaching each other so nearly at every turn at their summit that the gorge seems to be but an immense vaulted cavern with an entirely irresponsible torrent of water gyrating through it.

It drops itself down sheer precipices, in places thirty feet, and everywhere rushes, it never dances, but rushes with an ugly, wicked, vindictive rush, a cruel rush, a resistless force, as if it wanted to catch something in its merciless grasp, and toss it against rocks, grasp it when it came back, and hurl it down a dizzy fall of cruel, jagged rocks, and shoot it way up the side of the gorge, on other rocks, and finally release it when pounded to a jelly, in the river below.

This water is well-behaved enough when it reaches the river, but up here in the gorge it is the wildest, most cruel, most devilish and wicked water I ever saw.

Niagara impresses one with its calm, resistless strength, Minnehaha is beautiful enough to induce one, almost, to go over it, but this torrent in the gorge has strength only. It is a fiendish, impish body of water.

It is not utilized. Its only use is to support a very good hotel, the venerable party who takes a franc for admission to it, and several shops devoted to selling “souvenirs” to tourists. These are the only wheels this water power turns. About one hundred people make a comfortable living from the gorge, and they no doubt esteem it highly.

Of course the gorge has its legend. Every well regulated gorge in Switzerland as well as every other country in Europe has a legend, done in the most atrocious English, and execrably printed, which you can purchase of the local guide for what is equivalent to ten cents American money. I doubt not that Switzerland has a legend-factory running somewhere, which turns them out to order. People go several times, you see, and they want a new legend every time.

This legend accounts for the formation of the gorge, and I spent an entire night getting it into understandable English. It runs thus:—

Way back in the dark ages, when the devil was in the habit of coming in person to transact his business with men—and women—there was no gorge at all. The mountain was shaped not as it is now, but was a respectable mountain, with a properly conducted stream dancing down its side. This stream turned two mills, one owned by a very nice miller, named Balthazar, and the other by a very wicked miller, named Caspar.

Balthazar had the respect and esteem of his fellow-men, while Caspar was universally detested. He was a griping, grasping man, who took double toll, and was as avaricious as a grave-yard. Balthazar, on the other hand, was beloved by everybody, because he was good; and, because he was good, he was very poor. Caspar had succeeded in buying up his notes, and he held a claim on his mill, which he desired to get out of the way, as he wanted no competition. But Balthazar kept right along, for he had friends somewhere who advanced money to him, so that he could keep up the interest and defy the enemy.

Caspar tried every way to get rid of his competitor, but he could not, and he chafed under it. He dwelt upon it so long that it became a mania with him. How to crush Balthazar and have the sole privilege of plundering the people was the thought with him by day and night.

One Spring he bought more of Balthazar’s paper, but, to his chagrin, Balthazar came around promptly and paid it, the day it was due, and Caspar found himself foiled again.

And so that night when he was pacing his room and fretting and fuming about his disappointment, he remarked to himself mentally—a very dangerous thing in those days—that he would give his soul to be relieved of this popular rival.

No sooner thought than done. The archdemon appeared in person, and Caspar did not seem to be surprised.

“Are you in earnest, Herr Caspar?”

“Indeed I am. That man is poison to me. I must get rid of him and his mill.”

“Very right. You can do it, but you know the terms?”

“Certainly. You remove the mill, you ruin Balthazar, and after a time I become yours, I sign an article of agreement, writing my name in my own blood. That’s the regular thing, I believe!”

“You are right, old man, right as a trivet. Sign here.”

And he produced the document which he had with him. It stipulated that Balthazar’s mill was to be utterly destroyed, and Caspar’s not injured, and that things should be so fixed that Caspar’s would be the only respectable water-power possible on the mountain.

As a consideration for this friendly service, Caspar was, after twenty years of milling with no competition, to yield himself gracefully to the demon, body and soul.

Caspar whipped off his coat, cut his arm for blood, and signed.

The devil disappeared in a clap of thunder, leaving a perceptible odor of brimstone in the room, and Caspar went calmly to bed.

The next morning he heard that an immense stream of water had burst out of the mountain below his mill, and that it had swept poor Balthazar’s property entirely away—that not a vestige of it was left. He smiled grimly, doubled the size of his toll-dish, and went about his business.

Twenty years later, to the minute, the devil appeared and demanded his pay. But he did not know Caspar, who had been thinking the matter over for some two years, and being hale and hearty, had no idea of going at all, and especially of going where he had rashly ticketed himself. He had consulted an abbott of rare power in such cases, and the abbott had shown him how to evade the contract. The writer of the legend does not state just what this was, but it was sufficient.

Caspar declined to fulfil his contract, and the devil saw he was foiled. He recognized the superior power of the abbott, but he couldn’t help himself. He merely lashed his tail around, and smiling sarcastically, remarked:

“Very good, my fine fellow, you have won the first point in this game, but I shall proceed to show you that there are things over which the abbott has no control. Good night.”

He sailed out into the night, Caspar jeering him. He jeered too soon. For just then there came a horrible darkness, with terrible thunder and flashes of frightful lightning, and the mountain was rent in twain, and Caspar’s mill with himself and his live stock all went down into the chasm, and the Gorge du Trient was made.

Caspar’s body was found in the river below, with ugly marks about the throat, with the debris of his mill. There was not a splinter left of anything.

This is the legend. I don’t believe it, for several reasons.

If the devil had sufficient knowledge of the intention of men in advance to bring with him a contract all drawn up, (which must have cost him some trouble unless he kept them printed in blank) he would also have known that Caspar would outwit him in the end.

If he had the power to catch Caspar by destroying his mill by splitting the mountain, he had the same power before, and was just as sure of the miller before as after this exhibition of his power.

Going through all this rigmarole of signing and making contracts would be totally unnecessary. Satan is supposed to be cunning. What sense was there in laying traps for Caspar when Caspar was doing his level best to get to him anyhow? Had he let him alone, Caspar would have come to him of his own accord.

And then splitting a mountain to catch one miller would be something like firing a columbiad at a cock sparrow. It would be a great waste of ammunition. He could safely have depended upon Caspar’s own toll-dish.

He may have made the gorge knowing it would be used, as time rolled on, by guides and hotel-keepers, but the legend of the miller will not do.

However, it is the legend of the place, and so I have to give it. The only lesson I can draw from it is not a good one. The virtuous Balthazar lost his property just the same as the wicked Caspar, and as he probably starved to death immediately, while Caspar had a good time for twenty years, his virtue counted him nothing, so far as this world goes. I have found that out, however, in my own experience.

In every country in the world that has rocks, there is some frightfully high one from which a great many years ago a maiden leaped. Indian maidens were addicted to this in America, and so were maidens in Switzerland.

You are compelled to climb to the very top of the mountain on one side of the gorge to see the place where a maiden threw herself over. The guide said she was crossed in love by her parents, while our landlord had it that she was deserted by her lover. Thus you had two stories at the price of one, and could believe which you chose.

Tibbitts looked calmly down the frightful chasm.

“The maiden leaped from this spot?”

“Yes, sare.”

“How under Heaven did she ever get back!”

“She did not get back.”

“Did she hurt herself?”

“Hurt hairselluf! It ees five huntret veet to ze bottom. How could she fall five huntret veet and not hurt hairselluf?”

“Five hundred feet! Well, I should say it was rather risky. What did the old folks do about it?”

He wanted to know all the circumstances, but the information of guides on such subjects always ends with the blood-curdling tragedy. They know nothing of what happened after the girl took the fatal plunge.

The road from Vernayaz leads through a number of pretty Swiss villages, whose peculiarly built stone houses contrast strangely with the pretentious edifices of the towns and cities we had just left. The one narrow street through which the carriages passed is filled with queerly dressed people, to whom the passing of a tourist party is about the only event that relieves the dull routine of their monotonous lives.

Near Martigny we pass an old dilapidated castle, that, seven hundred years ago, was the stronghold of Peter of Savoy, who ruled with an iron hand the people in the neighboring Cantons.

Now we leave the valley of the Rhone and begin in earnest the ascent of the mountains.

It is hard to realize that horses and carriage can make their way over these great towering mountains. Apparently they are inaccessible as the clouds that float lazily above them. But we bowl along the hard white road at a rattling pace, and are soon at an elevation from which the villages in the valley below look like toy towns. The road is a continuous letter Z, winding up the side of the mountain, each tack bringing us higher and higher.

The air is clear and dry, so that at each turn in the road a wonderful view is afforded. Across the valley are seen well cultivated farms, with men and women hard at work in the harvest fields. Further down is a grove, the green foliage standing out in bold relief from the golden fields of grain that surround it, while above towers an old ruined church, its cold, gray color softened and subdued by the ivy that nearly covers it.

There is an exhilaration as we mount higher and higher. All thoughts of worldly cares are thrown to the winds and we revel in the delights of this new and wonderful experience. We almost envy the Swiss peasant as he cuts the sweet-smelling grass high up the mountain side. We are tempted to stop and visit some of these ugly chalets, with their stone-anchored roofs, which looked like miniature bee-hives from the valley below. We want to do almost anything to give vent to the superabundant supply of animal spirits this clear and bracing air produces.

We were subjected, however, to many grievous disappointments. We expected the moment we struck the Alps to see the graceful chamois, leaping from crag to crag, the Alpine hunter, dressed in knee breeches, with a peaked hat and particolored ribbons wound around his stockings. We kept sharp lookout for the Swiss maidens with their broad-brimmed hats and picturesque short dresses, and above all we hungered for a sight of a Swiss chalet, one of those delightfully beautiful and picturesque houses, all angles and gables, and things of that nature, which we all have admired at Long Branch and other watering places in America.

We saw no chamois, either leaping from crag to crag, or in any other business. If there are any chamois they manage to keep themselves in very strict seclusion.

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.

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.

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.

Then tourists would be satisfied and invest more liberally in wood carvings and music boxes, and would be more content with having got the full worth of their money.

The principal industry on the mountains is cheese, and selling refreshments to travelers. The travelers stop and drink wine every time possible, for the purpose of improving their taste in wines, which affords a very respectable revenue to the inhabitants along the roads.

The cattle in the Spring are driven to the very summits of such of the mountains as are not tipped with snow, in the little valleys of which a very sweet grass is found, which makes a cheese almost as good as the imitations that are produced in various sections of America. The people live upon a tolerably bad cheese, very bad bread, and still worse wine, and when one looks at the almost absolute sterility of the soil, the wonder is how they get enough of that to sustain life.

But they do. It takes very little to sustain a mountain family in this country. The women don’t wear gaiters with high heels at ten dollars a pair—wooden shoes, a pair of which lasts for several generations, does them, if indeed they do not go barefooted, which in the Summer is the prevailing fashion. Their clothing is substantial, though very coarse, and if they don’t go to theaters or operas, or have any of the expenses of a more luxurious civilization, they get on very well, and seem to be happy. As it is a day’s journey down a mountain to a village where there is anything to buy, they don’t buy very much; and as their little land furnishes all they can eat, drink and wear, they are just as rich as Rothschild, every bit. It isn’t what you want that makes you rich, it is what you don’t want. The mountain Swiss don’t want anything, and they have it. Therefore they are rich. Their government doesn’t bother them with taxes to any extent; they don’t require daily newspapers or magazines, or anything of that kind, and so they live on the next thing to nothing a long time, and die at the end of it, when they have just as much as anybody.

As quiet and stagnant as is the life of a Swiss family, don’t make the mistake of supposing them to be either unintelligent or stupid. They are well educated, and in every one of these ugly houses there are books, and books that are used. They keep themselves posted in everything that is going on in the world outside, their intelligence being a month or such a matter behind the rest of the world, but they get it, and they understand it when they do get it.

A sturdy race they are, and the world knows and appreciates them. There is scarcely a battle-field in Europe upon which they have not bled, and though subjected to the stigma of being hirelings and mercenaries, they have never proved false to the side they hired to. They do not scrutinize the cause they fight for very closely, unless it be their own, but when once enlisted they can be depended upon to the death.

Thousands of them are coming to the United States, and I wish every one of them could be multiplied by a hundred. They make excellent Americans, and we can’t have too many of them.