Inasmuch as the traveler through Switzerland is always disappointed in the matter of chamois, picturesquely clad and pretty girls and Swiss chalets, I insist that the government should furnish them. It is a matter for national action. The government should breed chamois, and train them to skip from crag to crag, it should maintain a force of chamois hunters, such as we see in pictures and at the theater, to hunt them, and it should have pretty girls dressed as we were led to expect to see them, at regular intervals, even if it should import them from Paris, and it should build on each Alpine pass at least a dozen chalets of the regulation style. Then tourists would be satisfied and invest more liberally in wood carvings and music boxes, and would be more content with having got the full worth of their money. [Illustration: INSIDE THE CHALET.] The principal industry on the mountains is cheese, and selling refreshments to travelers. The travelers stop and drink wine every time possible, for the purpose of improving their taste in wines, which affords a very respectable revenue to the inhabitants along the roads. The cattle in the Spring are driven to the very summits of such of the mountains as are not tipped with snow, in the little valleys of which a very sweet grass is found, which makes a cheese almost as good as the imitations that are produced in various sections of America. The people live upon a tolerably bad cheese, very bad bread, and still worse wine, and when one looks at the almost absolute sterility of the soil, the wonder is how they get enough of that to sustain life. [Sidenote: THE SWISS IN GENERAL.] But they do. It takes very little to sustain a mountain family in this country. The women don't wear gaiters with high heels at ten dollars a pair--wooden shoes, a pair of which lasts for several generations, does them, if indeed they do not go barefooted, which in the Summer is the prevailing fashion. Their clothing is substantial, though very coarse, and if they don't go to theaters or operas, or have any of the expenses of a more luxurious civilization, they get on very well, and seem to be happy. As it is a day's journey down a mountain to a village where there is anything to buy, they don't buy very much; and as their little land furnishes all they can eat, drink and wear, they are just as rich as Rothschild, every bit. It isn't what you want that makes you rich, it is what you don't want. The mountain Swiss don't want anything, and they have it. Therefore they are rich. Their government doesn't bother them with taxes to any extent; they don't require daily newspapers or magazines, or anything of that kind, and so they live on the next thing to nothing a long time, and die at the end of it, when they have just as much as anybody.