This disease is fearfully prevalent in these mountains, almost every other woman of age having it. I don't remember seeing a man with it, nor a very young woman, but it is almost the rule in some sections, in women of forty and over. Physicians do not pretend to cure it, and so it hangs and grows, and the neck swells and swells, till the goitre becomes an immense bag. It is a singular dispensation. Why should it be the exclusive property of women? It doesn't make much difference how a man looks, and the Swiss women, worked to death as they are, have little enough beauty at best, and with all these disadvantages to hang a goitre upon their necks is burdening them a trifle too much. Still, so much do they love their mountains, that they would stay among them if their necks should enlarge to the degree of requiring wheelbarrows to carry them comfortably. The Swiss chalet is another disappointment. We expected to see the mountains dotted all over with those beautiful houses, all gables and dormer windows, picturesquely painted in all sorts of gay colors, such as we see in the theaters. Such a house with a pretty peasant girl in short dress, with gay colored stockings, and a simple but very sweet broad straw hat, and a few dozens of chamois leaping from crag to crag, would make a very pretty picture and one worth going a long way to see. [Sidenote: THE SWISS COTTAGE.] As we were disappointed in the chamois and the maidens, so were we in the Swiss houses. There is everything in them but beauty. They are just about as beautiful as a western grain elevator or a Quaker meeting-house. There is enough timber in them--each stick crossing the other in a most unnecessary way, and there are gables, and dormer windows and all that, but they are put together in a most unsatisfactory way, if beauty is what you are after. They are absolutely shapeless. The roof is burdened with layers of stone to keep it on in the high winds that prevail, and they are invariably weather-beaten, dingy, and altogether unsatisfactory. [Illustration: OUTSIDE THE CHALET.] In one end of these uncouth dwellings the family reside, and the work is done, and in the other the cattle are stabled, in what in America we use as a barn. The cattle, the pigs and the poultry are all stabled convenient, only a thin wall separating them from the women and children. It must be confessed that the residence end of the hideous building is kept very clean, and very nicely, for your Swiss housewife is a good one, but the proximity to the stock would not be considered pleasant in any other country. They cannot plead lack of land for thus crowding together, for these mountains are immense, and very sparsely settled. It is so arranged probably for convenience.