There is also the female swine-herd, who daily takes to pasture the pigs and goats. She tends them all day on some stony, irreclaimed waste land. In the evening when she returns with her four or five score, each porker knows his own home in the village; some run on in advance of the herd to get as soon as possible to the supper they know will be ready for them; others do not separate themselves from the herd till they arrive at the familiar door. Behind the swine follow the goats with distended udders,--the poor man’s cow. They, too, disperse themselves in the same fashion, from the desire to be promptly relieved of their burden. Last of all come the deliberately-stepping, sober-minded cows. The tinkling of their bells is heard over the whole of the little village. In a few minutes the streets are cleared; every man, woman, and child appear to have followed the animals into the houses to give them their supper or to draw the milk from them, or, at all events, to bed them for the night. Thus do these peasants from their earliest years learn to treat their dumb associates kindly, almost as if they were members of the family, to the support of which they so largely contribute. They begin and end each day in company with them, and are perfectly familiar with the ways and wants of the egotistic pig, of the self-asserting, restless goat, and of the gentle, patient cow. Sound travels far in these mountain solitudes, and the bells of the flocks may be heard through them night and day. This concert of cow-bells and of sheep-bells, suddenly heard in solitude and repeated by the echoes, like a distant and mysterious choir, is one of the features of Alpine life that most powerfully impress the feelings and take hold of the imagination. The mountains’ response to the “alphorn” is most singular and beautiful. When the tune on the horn is ended, the Alps make, not an echo, but a reproduction of it, in an improved and heightened character; they take up, as it were, and chant the air again with infinite sweetness and a dancing grace that is delightful. They seem to constitute a natural instrument of music, of which the horn is but the awakening breath. The writer, on behalf of the New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, requested of the Swiss government samples of musical instruments of Swiss origin. In answer an “alphorn,” of ancient form, well constructed and of superior tone, was furnished, accompanied with the statement that, after careful investigation, it was believed to be the only musical instrument of “Swiss origin.” Distance softens the tone of the “alphorn,” and assimilates it more nearly to the flute-like sweetness of the echo which seems a sort of fairy answer coming out of some magical hall in the rock. The tone is powerful, and the middle notes extremely mellow.