At Geneva you get the first glimpse of the Alpenstock people, male and female. They are a queer lot. They appear to you at the hotels clad as follows: The men with a sort of blouse bound by an enormous belt, for which there is no earthly use, short knee breeches with woolen stockings reaching above the knee, and the most utterly absurd shoes that ever annoyed the human foot. The soles of these shoes are an inch thick; they project beyond the uppers, and are studded with nails, as if the wearer had joined an exploring party which would require eight years of his life, and make necessary one pair of shoes that should exist all that time, inasmuch as he would be far beyond the reach of that important adjunct of civilization, a cobbler. Then he has a broad-brimmed hat, with a clout about it, hanging down behind, and a vast assortment of baskets, flasks and glasses, and all sorts of appliances, provisions enough to join Livingstone or Stanley for the exploration of the interior of Africa. [Sidenote: FEMALE CLIMBERS.] The women are either misses of seventeen or mature women of thirty-eight. They have the same outfit of material and differ from the males only in the matter of dress. Everything that savors of femininity is religiously eliminated (even the bustle is sacrificed), heavy underclothing is worn, a most ungraceful skirt, the most barbarous English shoes appear on feet never too small, and their entire hideousness is made painfully visible, inasmuch as the straight skirt never reaches below the ankle. [Illustration: THE ALPINE GUIDE.] The Alpenstock is a staff perhaps seven feet long, of ash, very stout, with a hook upon one end and a spike in the other. In this hideous garb, in a stern sort of a way, as though they were leading a forlorn hope and never expected to escape with their lives, but were doing it as a sort of sacrificial duty, they ride out to the foot of the Alps somewhere, as safely and in as much luxury as though they were in rocking chairs in their own homes, and coming to the hotel thereat they purchase another lot of climbing apparatus, and hire all sorts of donkeys and mules and guides, and after a day or so commence the ascent. They go up roads that are so plain as to need no guides, on donkeys or mules, over paths that could be walked as well, and tiring half way up, stop and rest and never go farther, but return, with their mouths full of lies. Every mother's son and daughter of them claim to have made the full ascent of the peak essayed, and having read themselves up, talk as glibly about it as though they had lived upon the mountains all their lives, and knew every glacier as familiarly as they do their bedrooms.