THE COUNTRYSIDE AND THE MAN

On a lovely spring morning in the year 1829, a man of fifty or
thereabouts was wending his way on horseback along the mountain road
that leads to a large village near the Grande Chartreuse. This village
is the market town of a populous canton that lies within the limits of
a valley of some considerable length. The melting of the snows had
filled the boulder-strewn bed of the torrent (often dry) that flows
through this valley, which is closely shut in between two parallel
mountain barriers, above which the peaks of Savoy and of Dauphine
tower on every side.

All the scenery of the country that lies between the chain of the two
Mauriennes is very much alike; yet here in the district through which
the stranger was traveling there are soft undulations of the land, and
varying effects of light which might be sought for elsewhere in vain.
Sometimes the valley, suddenly widening, spreads out a soft
irregularly-shaped carpet of grass before the eyes; a meadow
constantly watered by the mountain streams that keep it fresh and
green at all seasons of the year. Sometimes a roughly-built sawmill
appears in a picturesque position, with its stacks of long pine trunks
with the bark peeled off, and its mill stream, brought from the bed of
the torrent in great square wooden pipes, with masses of dripping
filament issuing from every crack. Little cottages, scattered here and
there, with their gardens full of blossoming fruit trees, call up the
ideas that are aroused by the sight of industrious poverty; while the
thought of ease, secured after long years of toil, is suggested by
some larger houses farther on, with their red roofs of flat round
tiles, shaped like the scales of a fish. There is no door, moreover,