Volume Ii Part 21 (2/2)

I spread down my pocket handkerchief, and proceeded to see how many varieties I could gather, and in a very small circle W. and I collected eighteen. Could I have thought, when I looked from my window over this bleak region, that any thing so perfectly lovely as this little purple witch, for example, was to be found there? It was quite a significant fact. There is no condition of life, probably, so dreary that a lowly and patient seeker cannot find its flowers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _of a clump of a small flowering plant attached to what appears to be its rhizome._]

I began to think that I might be contented even there. But while I was looking I was so sickened by headache, and disagreeable feelings arising from the air, that I often had to lie down on the sunny side of the bank. W., I found, was similarly troubled; he said he really thought in the morning he was going to have a fever. We went back to the house. There were services in the chapel; I could hear the organ pealing, and the singers responding.

Seven great dogs were sunning themselves on the porch, and as I knew it was a subject particularly interesting to you, I made minute inquiries respecting them. Like many other things, they have been much overstated, I think, by travellers. They are of a tawny-yellow color, short haired, broad chested, and strong limbed. As to size, I have seen much larger Newfoundland dogs in Boston. I made one of them open his mouth, and can a.s.sure you it was black as night; a fact which would seem to imply Newfoundland blood. In fact the breed originally from Spain is supposed to be a cross between the Pyrenean and the Newfoundland. The biggest of them was called Pluto. Here is his likeness, which W. sketched.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _of a large, light-colored dog with medium-short fur at rest and wearing a broad patterned collar._]

For my part, I was a little uneasy among them, as they went walloping and frisking around me, flouncing and rolling over each other on the stone floor, and making, every now and then, the most hideous noises that it ever came into a dog's head to conceive.

As I saw them biting each other in their clumsy frolics, I began to be afraid lest they should take it into their heads to treat me like one of the family, and so stood ready to run.

The man who showed them wished to know if I should like to see some puppies; to which, in the ardor of natural history, I a.s.sented: so he opened the door of a little stone closet, and sure enough there lay madam in state, with four little blind, snubbed-nosed pledges. As the man picked up one of these, and held it up before me in all the helplessness of infancy, looking for all the world like a roly-poly pudding with a short tail to it, I could not help querying in my mind, are you going to be a St. Bernard dog?

One of the large dogs, seeing the door open, thought now was a good time to examine the premises, and so walked briskly into the kennel, but was received by the amiable mother with such a sniff of the nose as sent him howling back into the pa.s.sage, apparently a much wiser and better dog than he had been before. Their princ.i.p.al use is to find paths in the deep snow when the fathers go out to look for travellers, as they always do in stormy weather. They are not longlived; neither man nor animal can stand the severe temperature and the thin air for a long time. Many of the dogs die from diseases of the lungs and rheumatism, besides those killed by accidents, such as the falling of avalanches, &c. A little while ago so many died that they were fearful of losing the breed altogether, and were obliged to recruit by sending down into the valleys for some they had given away. One of the monks told us that, when they went out after the dogs in the winter storms, all they could see of them was their tails moving along through the snow. The monks themselves can stand the climate but a short time, and then they are obliged to go down and live in the valleys below, while others take their places.

They told us that there were over a hundred people in the _hospice_ when we were there. They were mostly poor peasants and some beggars. One poor man came up to me, and uncovered his neck, which was a most disgusting sight, swollen with goitre. I shut my eyes, and turned another way, like a bad Christian, while our Augustine friend walked up to him, spoke in a soothing tone, and called him ”my son.” He seemed very loving and gentle to all the poor, dirty people by whom we were surrounded.

I went into the chapel to look at the pictures. There was St. Bernard standing in the midst of a desolate, snowy waste, with a little child on one arm and a great dog beside him.

This St. Bernard, it seems, was a man of n.o.ble family, who lived nine hundred and sixty-two years after Christ. Almost up to that time a temple to Jupiter continued standing on this spot. It is said that the founding of this inst.i.tution finally rooted out the idolatrous wors.h.i.+p.

On Monday we returned to Martigny, and obtained a _voiture_ for Villeneuve. Drove through the beautiful Rhone valley, past the celebrated fall of the p.i.s.sevache, and about five o'clock reached the Hotel Byron, on the sh.o.r.e of the lake.

LETTER x.x.xVII.

HOTEL BYRON.

MY DEAR:--

Here I am, sitting at my window, overlooking Lake Leman. Castle Chillon, with its old conical towers, is silently pictured in the still waters. It has been a day of a thousand. We took a boat, with two oarsmen, and pa.s.sed leisurely along the sh.o.r.es, under the cool, drooping branches of trees, to the castle, which is scarce a stone's throw from the hotel. We rowed along, close under the walls, to the ancient moat and drawbridge. There I picked a bunch of blue bells, ”les clochettes,” which were hanging their aerial pendants from every crevice--some blue, some white.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _of blue bell flowers with sharp-bladed leaves._]

I know not why the old buildings and walls in Europe have this vivacious habit of shooting out little flowery e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns and soliloquies at every turn. One sees it along through France and Switzerland, every where; but never, that I remember, in America.

On the side of the castle wall, in a large white heart, is painted the inscription, _Liberte et Patrie_!

We rowed along, almost touching the castle rock, where the wall ascends perpendicularly, and the water is said to be a thousand feet deep. We pa.s.sed the loopholes that illuminate the dungeon vaults, and an old arch, now walled up, where prisoners, after having been strangled, were thrown into the lake.

Last evening we walked over the castle. An interesting Swiss woman, who has taught herself English for the benefit of her visitors, was our _cicerone_. She seemed to have all the old Swiss vivacity of attachment for ”_liberte et patrie_.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: _of a interior s.p.a.ce of hewn stone with high vaulted gothic arches._]

She took us first into the dungeon, with the seven pillars, described by Byron. There was the pillar to which, for protecting the liberty of Geneva, BONNEVARD was chained. There the Duke of Savoy kept him for six years, confined by a chain four feet long. He could take only three steps, and the stone floor is deeply worn by the prints of those weary steps. Six years is so easily said; but to _live_ them, alone, helpless, a man burning with all the fires of manhood, chained to that pillar of stone, and those three unvarying steps! Two thousand one hundred and ninety days rose and set the sun, while seedtime and harvest, winter and summer, and the whole living world went on over his grave. For him no sun, no moon, no star, no business, no friends.h.i.+p, no plans--nothing! The great millstone of life emptily grinding itself away!

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