all lands, keeping hotels, and amassing from the candle-ends of the
travelling public the fortune with which all Swiss hope to return home
to die.

[Illustration: _Washing Clothes in the Lake_]


XIII

Sometimes the country people I met greeted me, as sometimes they still
do in New Hampshire, but commonly they passed in silence. I think the
mountains must have had something to do with hushing the people: far and
near, on every hand, they rise such bulks of silence. The chief of their
stately company was always the Dent-du-Midi, which alone remains
perpetually snow-covered, and which, when not hooded in the rain-bearing
mists of that most rainy autumn, gave back the changing light of every
hour with new splendors, though of course it was most beautiful in the
early sunsets. Then its cold snows warmed and softened into something
supernally rosy, while all the other peaks were brown and purple, and
its vast silence was thrilled with a divine message that spoke to the
eye. Across the lake and on its farther shores the mountains were dimly
blue; but nearer, in the first days of our sojourn, they were green to
their tops. Away up there we could see the lofty steeps and slopes of
the summer pastures, and set low among them the chalets where the
herdsmen dwelt. None of the mountains seemed so bare and sterile as
Mount Washington, and though they were on a sensibly vaster scale than
the White Mountains generally, I remembered the grandeur of Chocorua and
Kearsarge in their presence. But my national--not to say my
hemispheric--pride suffered a terrible blow as the season advanced. I
had bragged all my life of the glories of our American autumnal foliage,