On the way from Interlaken to Brienz we passed through little villages, whose one street is filled with wood carving establishments, and almost every house between the two places has a small factory for the manufacture of these pretty trifles. [Illustration: WOOD CARVING.] At Brienz we went through a very large factory and saw the patient Swiss chipping away tirelessly at the huge piece of wood that was soon to be a medallion portrait. It is an art that requires great skill and delicacy of touch to produce fine work. In this factory there were some four hundred or five hundred men employed, and the work they turned out was marvelously beautiful. In fact one cannot sufficiently admire the wood carving of the region. The patient workers do everything artistic in the material, and it is artistic. Landscapes, portraits, hunting scenes, animals, angels, scriptural subjects, everything that is done on canvas or in marble, is done in wood, and many of the pieces are purchased by crowned heads, and at a very high price. [Illustration: THE HOME OF THE CARVER.] [Sidenote: THE ROMANCE OF THE WOOD CARVER.] The artists in wood are, however, very poorly paid, even for Switzerland. In America their wages would be considered as close to starvation as possible, without touching it. Think of a man capable of doing the most artistic work laboring at four francs a day, or eighty cents! This is as high as any, except an occasional phenomenal genius, gets, and they appear to be content with it. For this miserable sum they work so long as they can see, commencing at daylight and ending at dark. True, living is very cheap, and such as it is it ought to be. The wretched beer of the region is only about a cent a glass, and the black bread of the country costs next to nothing, and so the artist works all day and at night sits himself in his little café, and with his cheap wine and cheaper beer, plays cards contentedly, and enjoys himself thoroughly. After all he is as well as though he got ten dollars a day. He couldn't drink any more wine than he does, and neither would additional pay enlarge his capacity for black bread, and what does he want of anything more? It isn't what you want--it's what you don't want that makes you rich. Even in little wood carving Brienz, romance gets in. We saw on the street, there is only one in Brienz, a young man whose demoralized clothing, fiery eyes and unsteady steps, all bore evidence to the terrible fact of dissipation. He was the first drunken man of the genus loafer we had struck in Switzerland. The Young Man who Knows Everything looked at him and promptly remarked:--