For Some Time One Keeps To The Path Through The Wooded Gorge, And With The River Foaming Far Below; In Early Morning While This Path Is In Shade, Or, Again, After Sunset, It Is One Of The Most Beautiful Of Its Kind That I Know.

After a while a gate is reached, and an open upland valley is entered upon - evidently an old lake filled up, and neither very broad nor very long, but grassed all over, and with the river winding through it like an English brook.

This is the valley of Sambucco. There are two collections of stalle for the cattle, or monti - one at the nearer end and the other at the farther.

The floor of the valley can hardly be less than 5000 feet above the sea. I shall never forget the pleasure with which I first came upon it. I had long wanted an ideal upland valley; as a general rule high valleys are too narrow, and have little or no level ground. If they have any at all there often is too much as with the one where Andermatt and Hospenthal are - which would in some respects do very well - and too much cultivated, and do not show their height. An upland valley should first of all be in an Italian-speaking country; then it should have a smooth, grassy, perfectly level floor of say neither much more nor less than a hundred and fifty yards in breadth and half-a-mile in length. A small river should go babbling through it with occasional smooth parts, so as to take the reflections of the surrounding mountains. It should have three or four fine larches or pines scattered about it here and there, but not more. It should be completely land- locked, and there should be nothing in the way of human handiwork save a few chalets, or a small chapel and a bridge, but no tilled land whatever. Here oven in summer the evening air will be crisp, and the dew will form as soon as the sun goes off; but the mountains at one end of it will keep the last rays of the sun. It is then the valley is at its best, especially if the goats and cattle are coming together to be milked.

The valley of Sambucco has all this and a great deal more, to say nothing of the fact that there are excellent trout in it. I have shown it to friends at different times, and they have all agreed with me that for a valley neither too high nor too low, nor too big nor too little, the valley of Sambucco is one of the best that any of us know of - I mean to look at and enjoy, for I suppose as regards painting it is hopeless. I think it can be well rendered by the following piece of music as by anything else:- {33}

[At this point in the book a music score is given]

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