, its annals piously preserved by
ancient chroniclers, this country is German only in its eastern rocky
portion; but where the castle stands and in all the wide valleys which
open towards the setting sun, it is of purest Romand speech and
character. Here ruled for six hundred years a sovereign line of counts
whose history, a pastoral epic, is melodious with song and legend, and
glowing with all the pageantry and chivalry of the middle ages. Although
skirted by the great Roman roads, and flanked by outpost towers, Gruyere
was never romanized, being settled only in its outlying plains by
occasional Gallo-Roman villas, while the interior country, ringed by a
barrier of almost inaccessible mountains, was left to the early
Helvetian adventurers who had first penetrated its wild forests and its
mountain fastnesses. Here, unaffected alike by Roman domination or
Teuton destruction, they had set up the altars of their Druid faith and
here preserved their ancient customs and their speech.

Here also traveled the adventurous Greek merchants from old Massilia
(Marseilles), leaving in their buried coins and in the Greek words of
the Gruyere dialect the impress of their ancient visitation.

A country fit for mysterious rites, for the habitation of the nature
deities of the Druid mythology, was Gruyere in those early days. The
deep caverns, the "black" lakes, and the terrifying depths of the
precipitous defiles through which the mountain streams rushed into
marshy valleys, were frequented by wild beasts and birds, and haunted in
the imagination of the people by fairies and evil spirits holding unholy
commerce for the souls of men. Here until the Teuton invasion the early
Celts lived unmolested, when some fugitives from the once smiling cities
and the cultivated plains came to join them in the refuge of their
mountain homes. Strange to their half-savage brothers were these
softened and romanized Celts who had tended the olives and the vines on
sunny lake sides, and who in earlier days had mingled in Dionysian
revels with Roman maidens with curled locks and painted cheeks. Strange
their tales of the white pagan temples, and all the glories of the
imperial cities left smouldering in ashes after the Teuton hordes had
worked their will. The arduous pioneer life of their predecessors and
the task of clearing and cultivating their wild asylum among the
mountains and the marshes was now their lot. Adopting slowly the altered
speech of these