walls are very precisely and prettily plastered; and it is rendered quite complete by the addition of two neat little bow-windows, supported on neat little mahogany brackets, full of neat little squares of red and yellow glass. Its door is approached under a neat little veranda, "uncommon green," and is flanked on each side by a neat little round table, with all its legs of different lengths, and by a variety of neat little wooden chairs, all very peculiarly uncomfortable, and amazingly full of earwigs: the whole being surrounded by a garden full of flints, burnt bricks, and cinders, with some water in the middle, and a fountain in the middle of it, which won't play; accompanied by some goldfish, which won't swim; and by two or three ducks, which will splash. Now, I am excessively sorry to inform the members of any respectable English family, who are making themselves uncomfortable in one of these ingenious conceptions, under the idea that they are living in a Swiss cottage, that they labour under a melancholy deception; and shall now proceed to investigate the peculiarities of the real building.
The life of a Swiss peasant is divided into two periods; that in which he is watching his cattle at their summer pasture on the high Alps,[1] and that in which he seeks shelter from the violence of the winter storms in the most retired parts of the low valleys. During the first period,
- ↑ I use the word Alp here, and in future, in its proper sense, of a high mountain pasture; not in its secondary sense, of a snowy peak.
