that does not duly exhibit a basket in which the cheeses are hung up
to dry. Every roadside and every croft is adorned with vines; which
here, as in Italy, they train to grow about dwarf elm trees, whose
leaves are stripped off to feed the cattle.

Nature, in her caprice, has brought the sloping hills on either side
so near together in some places, that there is no room for fields, or
buildings, or peasants' huts. Nothing lies between them but the
torrent, roaring over its waterfalls between two lofty walls of
granite that rise above it, their sides covered with the leafage of
tall beeches and dark fir trees to the height of a hundred feet. The
trees, with their different kinds of foliage, rise up straight and
tall, fantastically colored by patches of lichen, forming magnificent
colonnades, with a line of straggling hedgerow of guelder rose, briar
rose, box and arbutus above and below the roadway at their feet. The
subtle perfume of this undergrowth was mingled just then with scents
from the wild mountain region and with the aromatic fragrance of young
larch shoots, budding poplars, and resinous pines.

Here and there a wreath of mist about the heights sometimes hid and
sometimes gave glimpses of the gray crags, that seemed as dim and
vague as the soft flecks of cloud dispersed among them. The whole face
of the country changed every moment with the changing light in the
sky; the hues of the mountains, the soft shades of their lower slopes,
the very shape of the valleys seemed to vary continually. A ray of
sunlight through the tree-stems, a clear space made by nature in the
woods, or a landslip here and there, coming as a surprise to make a
contrast in the foreground, made up an endless series of pictures
delightful to see amid the silence, at the time of year when all
things grow young, and when the sun fills a cloudless heaven with a