Even A Boulder, Whose Front Is
Too Precipitous To Have Retained The Snow, Seems, If You Come Upon
It In
Your walk, a perfect gem of colour, reminds you almost
painfully of other places, and brings into your head the
Delights
of more Arcadian days - the path across the meadow, the hazel dell,
the lilies on the stream, and the scents, the colours, and the
whisper of the woods. And scents here are as rare as colours.
Unless you get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall
smell nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour of
frost. Sounds, too, are absent: not a bird pipes, not a bough
waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes by, the
sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through to
no other accompaniment but the crunching of your steps upon the
frozen snow.
It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each one village from
one end to the other. Go where you please, houses will still be in
sight, before and behind you, and to the right and left. Climb as
high as an invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations
nested in the wood. Nor is that all; for about the health resort
the walks are besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids
about their shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys trying to
learn to jodel, and by German couples silently and, as you venture
to fancy, not quite happily, pursuing love's young dream.
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