having danced continuously for three days over the mountain leagues
between Gruyere and Chateau D'Oex, and great was the fame of Count
Perrod and his dancing in this _Grande Coquille_."

Such was life in this idyllic country, the beloved _Grevire_ of the
melodious Romand speech, where "the houses are high with roofs leaning
far towards the ground, where the plums are so ripe they fall with the
breeze, where there are oats and tressed wheat, cows black and white and
rich cheese, black goats, too, and horned oxen--and beautiful maids who
would wed."

Nourished on rich milk smelling of the aromatic grasses of their
pastures, white and pink as the apples of their orchards; light-footed
and vigorous from their mountain life, their dancing and their athletic
sports, the Gruyere people developed a beauty celebrated even in the
grave pages of the historians. From their hearts warm with the sun,
their fancy fed by the beauty of their ravishing country, issued songs
witty and sad, and always melodious with their soft Italian vocables, a
literature in Romand patois. Thus the golden age of chivalry, rhyming
harmoniously with the golden age of the herdsmen, in the blue circle of
the Gruyere heights, grew to its noon day.

Then, suddenly as a tempest gathering across the sun pours quick
destruction over a parterre of flowers, black horror swallowed up
Gruyere. The plague called the Black Death, born in the Levant and
rushing like a destroying flood with terrifying rapidity over the
borders of Switzerland, penetrated even into the mountain-encircled
country of Count Pierre. The devils and evil spirits of the caverns and
the forests seemed now in the imagination of the Celtic people to be the
sinister authors of this mysterious and devastating curse. The youths
and maidens, no longer dancing to rhymed choruses of love and joy, swung
wildly in dances of death among the abandoned corpses.

Sprung from the carnival dances, where the masked Death forcing the
terrified maidens to his embrace led them to the cemeteries to celebrate
the memory of the dead, the priest countenanced these masks as religious
rites and taught the superstitious people that their gifts would ease
the souls of those sent suddenly unshrived to hell. With solemn phrase
and syncopated notes, the _danse macabre_ wound through the darkened
street around the shadowed crucifix up to the chapel door, where in
hideous masks, and dancing still, the hallucinated people, ca