of healthy purity prevailing around these cottage homes. Every one, according to his means, endeavors to make the homestead an ornament to the grassy and elm-shadowed wayside. The green rock-strewn turf comes up to the door, and the bench is along the wall outside. Flowers surround and adorn the windows, the luscious clusters of the vine ripen above the porch, and the little violet creeps over the stone steps or hangs in a sunny niche, its flowers gleaming remotely. Nothing can be more charming than the large carnations which often brighten the dark larch or pine-wood chalets, with their glossy red blossoms hanging from the windows and balconies. The pleasant vine-sheltered door seems to hospitably invite the imagination of the passer-by into the sweet domestic interior of this cottage life. And there is about the inner life of these humble homes a something one may almost say of sanctity, which is not so apparent, at all events on the surface of things, in splendid mansions. Their splendor is transmuted money, there is no poetry in it; if hearts are moved by it, it is not in that fashion or to that issue that it touches them. Quite different with these quiet and secluded homes. There every object has a pleasing history. There industry has accumulated its fruits, frugality its comforts, and virtue diffused its contentment. The care that is taken of it tells you how hard it had been to come by. You read in it a little tale of the labor, the self-denial expended on its acquisition; it is a revelation of an inner life which you are the better for contemplating and for sympathizing with. Shut off from the world, untainted by luxury, unstained by avarice mid lonely toil, practising the simple forms of life and faith, maintaining bravely and contentedly a hard struggle in their Alpine glens, these peasants are on better terms with life than many people who are regarded to have made a better bargain. “To watch the corn grow or the blossoms set, to draw hard breath on the ploughshare or spade,” have attractions for them, not accounted for in the meagre train of advantages and comforts they bring, and must be sought in the inspiration of the poet,-- “Happy the man whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound; Content to breathe his native air On his own ground. Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread, Whose flocks supply him with attire; Whose trees in summer yield him shade, In winter fire.” Often the cottage is perched on a mountain crag, and the peasant must be sleepless and prompt, for he lies down with danger at his door and must rise to meet it when the moment comes. There is a continual menace of desolation and ruin: “No zephyr fondly soothes the mountain’s breast, But meteors glare and stormy glooms invest.”