The industry, thrift, helpfulness, and simple contentment of the Swiss peasants, next to the natural scenery, attract our attention. One must respect their laborious industry, frugality, and perseverance, and regret that so much toil, with such close and unfailing economy, should have such meagre results. Dwelling among the crags and clouds, their flats mostly water and their slopes mostly ice, they get out of their little holdings every farthing that they will yield, and squander nothing. There is a kind of manliness in their never-ending struggle against the niggardliness and severity of nature; out-braving and beating its hard opposition. Sharp-pressing need spurs them to wring a difficult and scant subsistence from the mountain-steeps. Secluded and poor, yet brave and cheerful, they recall the lines from the description of the old Corycian peasant: “And wisely deem’d the wealth of monarchs less Than little of his own, because his own did please.” Every little scrap of ground is turned to the best account. If a few square yards can anywhere be made or reclaimed the requisite labor is not grudged. Many of these sturdy people compel an incredibly little spot of ground to yield them enough, and some to spare. This surprising product from a soil, much of it very poor, is due to the perfection of spade-work; each field, or rather patch, has the perfection of shape given to it to facilitate cultivation and drainage. This small cultivator, only with spade in hand, can fertilize the waste and perform prodigies which nothing but his love of the land could enable him to accomplish. These peasants have a proverb that “if the plough has a ploughshare of iron, the spade has a point of gold.” In the mountainous districts the land is reclaimed by this _petite culture_. In fact, the man makes the very soil. He builds terraces along steep inclines, lining them with blocks of stone, and then packs the earth to them, transforming the mountain and the rock into a little patch where he plants a vine or raises a little oats or maize. Up the heights of rocks which even goats cannot climb, on the very brow of the abyss, the peasant goes, clinging to the precipice with iron crampers on his feet in search of grass. He hangs on the sides of the rocks which imprison the valley and mows down a few tufts of grass from craggy shelves. The hay thus gathered is called _wildheu_, and the reaper _wildheuer_. This peasant mountain-mower is essentially _sui generis_. He is accustomed to all the perils of the mountain, and the day before the mowing season begins--a day fixed by communal decree--he bids farewell, perhaps for the last time, to his wife and children. His scythe on his shoulder, armed with his iron-shod stick, provided with his clamp-irons, a cloth or a net rolled up in his bag, he sets out at midnight, in order that the dawn may find him at his work. During the two months of hay-harvest he only goes down to the village three or four times to renew his