supply of food or linen. By this hard and perilous occupation an Alpine mower makes from three to five francs a day, his food not included; and many times under some projecting rock he must seek a bed and pass the night. Once dried, this wild hay is carefully gathered into a cloth or net and carried down to the first little plain, where it can be made into a stack, which is loaded with large stones to prevent it being blown away. In winter, when everything is covered with snow, the mower climbs again the perpendicular sides of the mountain, carrying his little wooden sledge on his shoulders. He loads it with hay, seats himself on the front, and shoots down with the swiftness of an arrow. At times, the snow softened by the warm wind which blows upon the heights, is detached in an avalanche behind him, and swallows him up before he reaches the valley. This aromatic hay, composed of the nourishing flora of the high Alps, of delicate and succulent plants, of the wild chrysanthemum, the dwarf carline thistle, the red-flowered veronica, the Alpine milfoil with its black calyx, the clover with its great tufts, and the meum, an umbelliferous plant, gives a delicious milk, and is greatly sought after for the fattening of cattle. In these steep solitudes where the grass is found, the life of man is so exposed and accidents are so frequent that the law forbids there should be more than one mower in a family. With him it is a fight for life, not infrequently conducted to the death. At all times great charges of wrath hang over him,--a beetling crag, a stream of stones, a cataract of ice, a moving field of snow, the flash that rends his roof, the wind that strips his trees, the flood that drowns his land, against each of these messengers of ill he must hold a separate watch, and must learn to brave each danger when it comes, alike by flush of noon and in the dead of night. The little valley below lies at the mercy of these ice- and storm-engendering heights. Year by year the peasants fight against its being extorted from their dominion. Yet this feeble community in the valley, by their stout hearts and virtuous lives, continue to make it smile on the frowning mountains: “Durum! sed levius fit patientia Quicquid corrigere est nefas.”