The devotional observances over, Easter Monday came with all the joyous celebrations with which the villagers were wont to _fête_ that happy day. It was a time for families to assemble their scattered members, for old and attached friends to renew the pledges of their friendship, for those at variance with each other to become reconciled; little children paid visits to their grandfathers and grandmothers, with bouquets of spring flowers, repeating the simple verses of some village hymn to welcome in the morning; garlands and wreaths hung from every door-porch; lovers scaled up the galleries to leave a rose, or an Alp daisy, plucked some thousand feet high among the snow-peaks, at their sweethearts’ window. Pious souls made little presents to the Curé in the chapel itself. The cattle were led through the village in a great procession, with garlands on their heads and fresh flowers fastened to their horns; the villagers accompanying them with a Tyrol song, descriptive of the approaching delights of summer, when they could quit their dark dwellings and rove free and wild over their native hills. It was joy every where: in the glad faces and the glancing eyes, the heartfelt embraces of those who met and saluted with the well-known “_Gott grilse dich_--God greet thee!” in the little dwellings pranked with holly-boughs and wild flowers; in the chapel glittering with tapers on every altar, pious offerings of simple hearts; in the tremulous accents of age, in the boisterous glee of childhood, it was joy. It was the season of gifts, too. And what scenes of pleasure and delight were there, as some new arrival from the valley displayed before the admiring eyes of a household some little toy, the last discovery of inventive genius: Bauer-houses, that took to pieces and exhibited all their interior economy at will; saw-mills, that actually seemed to work, so vigorously did they perform the incessant time that mark their labour; dolls of every variety of attraction, but all in Tyrol taste; nutcrackers that looked like old men, but smashed nuts with the activity of the youngest; soldiers of lead, stout-looking fellows, that never quitted the posts committed to them, if the wire was not too powerful--all were there; appearing, besides, with a magic in true keeping with their wonderful properties. Some emerged from unknown pockets in the cuff of a jacket; others, from the deep waistband of particoloured leather; some, from the recesses of a hat: but all in some wonderful guise that well became them.