The peasants call and answer their companions from peak to peak in musical notes. The _Ranz des Vaches_, German _Kuhreihen_, are a class of melodies prevailing and peculiar to the herdsmen. There is no particular air of this name, but nearly every Canton has its own herdsman’s song, each varying from the others in the notes as well as in the words, and even in the dialect. There are as many songs and airs which go by this name as there are valleys in Switzerland. A verse of one, as rendered in the Canton of Appenzell, runs: “The cow-herds of the Alps Arise at an early hour. CHORUS. Ha, ah! ha, ah! Come all of you, Black and white, Red and mottled, Young and old; Beneath this oak I am about to milk you, Beneath this poplar I am about to press, Liauba! Liauba! in order to milk.” It is a song of melancholy, of the homesickness in which the absent Swiss sees again, as in a musical vision, the chalet in which he was born, the mountain where the herds shake their mellow bells as they graze. It is, however, only in the refrain that is heard the melancholy note, in this _Liauba! Liauba!_ thrown lingeringly to the winds, and going from echo to echo, till it expires like a lament, and is lost like a sigh in the infinite depths of the valley. The herds are said to love and obey its strains. Without anything striking in the composition, it has a powerful influence over the Swiss. Its effect on Swiss soldiers absent in foreign service was so great, giving rise to an irrepressible longing to return to their own country, that it was forbidden to be played in the Swiss regiments in the French service, on pain of death. All the music of the mountains is strange and wild, having most probably received its inspiration from the grandeur of the natural objects. Most of the sounds partake of the character of echoes, being high-keyed but false notes, such as the rocks send back to the valleys when the voice is raised above its natural key in order that it may reach the caverns and savage recesses of inaccessible precipices. The Swiss _yodel_, with its falsetto notes, is heard everywhere. Nor must the sounds of the landscape be forgotten. With the bleating of the flocks and the chimes of the cow-bells are mingled the murmuring of the bees, the running streams, whispering pines, the melancholy voice of the goat-herder, and the plaintive whistle of the mountain thrush.