Mr. Chowdler himself had returned in splendid fighting form. He had spent the greater part of the holidays at Sauersprudel, and he had employed the time in wrestling and prevailing. Long before “all the vulgar people that Harry hates so” (we are quoting from Mrs. Chowdler) flocked out to Switzerland at Christmas, Mr. Chowdler had discovered Sauersprudel in the Spitzenthal and planted the British flag there. It is true that all the English families who have visited the place in Mr. Chowdler’s wake speak of themselves as having discovered it too. But that does not alter the fact that Mr. Chowdler was the real Christopher Columbus of Sauersprudel and the father of the Adler Hotel--at least as a winter resort. In the early days of the British occupation the settlers were not numerous, but they came regularly every winter. There were, besides Mr. and Mrs. Chowdler, the Hon. Fitzroy Plashy and party, Canon and Mrs. Dubbin, Dr. Cushat and family, Mr. Weatherbury, K.C., and a few others who had suddenly realised that sunshine and frost are not peculiar to the Engadine, and that Sauersprudel is much nearer to London than St. Moritz is. These pioneers lived together on fairly amicable terms, enjoying equal rights, but possessing no written laws, no organised constitution. But, as the tide of cheap immigration brought strange faces to the Adlerhof in ever-increasing numbers, the old patriarchal life was bound to come to an end in favour of some system more congenial to the British temperament--one, that is to say, which would classify the guests and admit of a distinction between governors and governed. Accordingly, Mr. Chowdler and the original families took up the white man’s burden, formed themselves into a permanent committee, and set themselves to organise life on the principles which have made sport the thing it is. They created a skating club, a tobogganing club, a ski-ing club, and a curling club, each with rules and tests and an etiquette of its own; they appointed competitions, and decided in what particular form of dissipation the guests were to indulge of an evening. In a word, they gave the Adlerhof the blessings of a firm and orderly government. With a prescriptive right to the best rooms and the chief place at feasts, they were the aristocracy of the hotel, governing, as befits an aristocracy, in the interests of the many, but holding discreetly aloof.