SWITZERLAND.
"I LIKED the mountain girl best of all," thought Lucy. "I wonder whether
I shall ever get among the mountains again. There's a great stick in the
corner that Uncle Joe calls his alpenstock. I'll go and read the names
upon it. They are all the mountains where he has used it."
She read Mount Blanc, Mount Cenis, the Wengern, and so on; and of course
as she read and sung them over to herself, they lulled her off into her
wonderful dreams, and brought her this time into a meadow, steep and
sloping, but full of flowers, the loveliest flowers, of all kinds,
growing among the long grass that waved over them. The fresh clear air
was so delicious that she almost hoped she was gone back to her dear
Tyrol; but the hills were not the same. She saw upon the slope
quantities of cows, goats, and sheep, feeding just as on the Tyrolese
Alps; but beyond was a dark row of pines, and up above, in the sky as it
were, rose all round great sharp points--like clouds for their
whiteness, but not in their straight jagged outlines; and here and there
the deep grey clefts between seemed to spread into white rivers, or over
the ruddy purple of the half-distance came sharp white lines darting
downwards.
As she sat up in the grass and looked about her, a bark startled her. A
dog began to growl, bark, and dance round her, so that she would have
been much frightened if the next moment a voice had not called him
off--"Fie, Brilliant, down; let the little girl alone. _Fi donc._ He is
good, Mademoiselle, never fear. He helps me keep the cows."
[Illustration: "I cut it out with my knife, all myself."
_Page 98._]
"Who are you, then?"
"I am Maurice, the little herd-boy. I live with my grandmother, and work
for her."
"What, in keeping cows?"
"Yes; and look here!"
"O the delicious little cottage! It has eaves, and windows, and
balconies, and a door, and little cows and sheep, and men and women, all
in pretty white wood! You did not make it, Maurice?"
"Yes, truly, I did; I cut it out with my knife, all myself."
"How clever you must be. And what shall you do with it?"
"I shall watch for a carriage with ladies winding up that long road; and
then I shall stand and take off my hat, and hold out my cottage. Perhaps
they will buy it, and then I shall have enough to get grandmother a warm
gown for the winter. When I grow bigger I will be a guide, like my
father."
"A guide?"
"Yes, to lead travellers up to the mountain-tops. There is nowhere you
English will not go. The harder a mountain is to climb, the more bent
you are on going up. And oh, I shall love it too! There are the great
glaciers, the broad streams of ice that fill up the furrows of the
mountains, with the crevasses so blue and beautiful and cruel. It was in
one of them my father was swallowed up."
"Ah! then how can you love them?" said Lucy.
"Because they are so grand and so beautiful," said Maurice. "No other
place has the like, and they make one's heart swell with wonder, and joy
in the God who made them. And it is only the brave who dare to climb
them!"
And Maurice's eyes sparkled, and Lucy looked at the clear, stern glory
of the mountain points, and felt as if she understood him.