At one of the little alp-huts among the higher pastures, Will Deverill murmured a cheerful “Guten Morgen,” as he passed, to a buxom peasant lass in a woollen kirtle, who stood busy at her churn by the door of her châlet. The girl curtseyed, and looked back at them with such a good-humoured smile that Florian, as an admirer of female beauty, couldn’t resist the temptation of standing still for a moment to take a good long gaze at her. “What’s she doing up here alone?” he asked at last, turning curiously to Will, as the girl still smiled at him. “Does she come up here every day? It’s a fearful long pull for her. But then—this charming air! such strength! such agility!” “Why, she lives here,” Will answered, surprised that anyone shouldn’t know what to him was such an obvious and familiar fact. “She doesn’t come up at all, except once in the spring; and in autumn she goes down again. It must be nearly time for her to go down now, I should say. There’s not much fodder left in these upper alps here.” “Lives here!” Florian exclaimed, taken aback. “What?—and sleeps here as well? You don’t mean to say she sleeps in that little wooden box there?” “Certainly. She’s a _sennerin_, you know; it’s her business to do it. All the alp girls live like that; they’ve been born and brought up to it.” In his innermost soul, Florian was dying to know what manner of wild beast a _sennerin_ might be—being undecided in his own mind as to whether it was most probably the name of a race, a religion, a caste, or a profession. But it would have been treason to his principles to confess this fact, so he compromised with his curiosity by murmuring blandly in reply, “Oh, ay, to be sure, a _sennerin_! I might have guessed it! Do you think now, Deverill, if we asked her very nicely, she’d let us go in and inspect her châlet?” “I’m sure she would,” Will answered, half repressing a smile. “They see so little of any outsiders while they’re up here on their alps that they’re only too glad, as a rule, when a stranger visits them. We’ll give her a couple of kreuzers for a glass of milk; that’ll serve as an introduction.”