The traveller who gazes admiringly upon the vineclad hills of the Jura, rising, terrace upon terrace, till the eye can scarce distinguish the limit between the work of man and the rock of ages which still crowns the summit, will learn with surprise that the mind which conceived of such stupendous labor, and the hand which held out honor and freedom as its reward, were a woman's. Under a burning sun, or exposed to a bitter, glacial _bisè_, the first cultivators, partly women, climbed slowly and painfully, by rocky ledges or crevices, along those dangerous slopes and beetling cliffs, where trees were to be hewn down and briers plucked up, raising by manual efforts alone the stone necessary for the steps and walls, and the deep tunnels for the safe passage of the torrents which vegetation now conceals. And among them, wherever her donkey's foot could find a way, went the woman who devised the work and bestowed the guerdon, with the distaff on her saddle, which gives her to this day the name of Bertha the spinner. Yes, it was Bertha, of the Transjurane, who, about the middle of the tenth century, undertook this work; opened the old Roman roads; and, in defending her people against the Saracen hordes, first devised, it may be, the modern telegraph. A prolonged line from her Alps to the Jura is still set with the solid stone towers from which Bertha's sentinels warned each other.[19] On the 13th of April, 1809, the French and Bavarian prisoners held by the Tyrolese at Steinach were marched to Schwatz, and thence to Salzburg, under an escort of women: and the prisoners, at least, felt sufficient confidence in the physical strength of the guard; for they made no attempt to escape. "Not a year ago," writes Anna Johnson of Germany, "I saw a young girl standing up to her knees in a manure-heap, which she shovelled into a cart, and then drove to the field. She was hired to do this work at fourteen dollars a year. On the mountains, the women were carrying soil and manure to the vines in baskets, as Queen Bertha taught them nine centuries ago." A still less pleasant picture may be drawn from Köhl's "Reminiscences of Montenegro." "Down among the stones, on the banks of the Fuimera," he says, "some Cattaro women and girls were washing and scraping the entrails of the goats that the men had brought to market. There was one tall, slender, handsome girl, dressed in a crimson petticoat, and jacket embroidered with gold, and her hair elegantly fastened with golden pins. A pair of richly wrought slippers lay on the stone beside her; and she laughed and talked merrily as she washed and scraped away. At last, she packed the whole into a tub, and lifted it on her gayly dressed head to carry home. The next day was Sunday; and I met her, radiant with beauty and gold embroidery, on her way to church. I often met these girls carrying on foot the baggage of the riding-parties."