veniently
cold, would be, but for the winds that blow over the snow-clad hills
surprisingly hot. To build an hotel here seems a perilously bold
undertaking. It is not on the way to anywhere, and people going from
the outer world must march up the hill, and, when they are tired of it,
must needs, like the Duke of York in his famous military expedition,
march down again. None but a Swiss would build an hotel here, and few
but English would frequent it. Yet the shrewdness of the proprietor has
been amply justified, and Les Avants is becoming in increasing degree
a favourite pilgrimage.

The hotel was built nearly twenty years ago. Previously the little
valley it dominates had been planted with one or two chalets which
for more than half a century have looked out upon the deathless snows
of the Dent du Midi. There is one which has rudely carved over the
lintel of its door the date 1816. Noting which, the Chancery Barrister,
with characteristic accuracy, observed that "five centuries look down
upon us."

Our landlord is an enterprising man. His business in life is to keep an
hotel, and the height of his ambition is to keep it well. Only a
fortnight ago he returned from a grand tour of the winter
watering-places, from the Bay of Biscay to the Bay of Genoa. The
ordinary attractions of the show places from Biarritz to Bordighera had
no lure for him. What he studied were the hotels and their various modes
of management. He told us, with a flush of pride on his sun-tanned
cheek, that he travelled as an ordinary tourist. There was no hint of
his condition or the object of his journey, no appeal to confraternity
with a view to getting bed and breakfast at trade prices, or some
reduction on the _table d'hote_ charges. He travelled as a sort of Haroun
al Raschid among innkeepers, haughtily paying his bills, and possibly
feeing the waiters. He is a very good sort of a fellow, attentive and
obliging, and it is odd how we all agree in the hope that he was from
time to time over-charged.

It is a fair prospect looked out upon from the bedroom window on our
arrival. Almost at our feet, it seems, is the Lake of Geneva, though
we remember the wearisome climb up the hill, and know it must be miles
away. On the other side are the snow-clad hills that reach down to
Savoy on the east, and are crowned by the heights of the Dent du Midi
on the west. On the left, flanking our own place of abode, rise up the
grim heights of the Roches de Naye,