lowers. Across the front of the
house, and up the spreading eaves and along the fanciful railings of
the shallow porch, are elaborate carvings--wreaths, fruits, arabesques,
verses from Scripture, names, dates, etc. The building is wholly of
wood, reddish brown in tint, a very pleasing color. It generally has
vines climbing over it. Set such a house against the fresh green of the
hillside, and it looks ever so cozy and inviting and picturesque, and is
a decidedly graceful addition to the landscape.

One does not find out what a hold the chalet has taken upon him, until
he presently comes upon a new house--a house which is aping the town
fashions of Germany and France, a prim, hideous, straight-up-and-down
thing, plastered all over on the outside to look like stone, and
altogether so stiff, and formal, and ugly, and forbidding, and so out of
tune with the gracious landscape, and so deaf and dumb and dead to the
poetry of its surroundings, that it suggests an undertaker at a picnic,
a corpse at a wedding, a puritan in Paradise.

In the course of the morning we passed the spot where Pontius Pilate is
said to have thrown himself into the lake. The legend goes that after
the Crucifixion his conscience troubled him, and he fled from Jerusalem
and wandered about the earth, weary of life and a prey to tortures
of the mind. Eventually, he hid himself away, on the heights of Mount
Pilatus, and dwelt alone among the clouds and crags for years; but rest
and peace were still denied him, so he finally put an end to his misery
by drowning himself.

Presently we passed the place where a man of better odor was born. This
was the children's friend, Santa Claus, or St. Nicholas. There are some
unaccountable reputations in the world. This saint's is an instance. He
has ranked for ages as the peculiar friend of children, yet it appears
he was not much of a friend to his own. He had ten of them, and when
fifty years old he left them, and sought out as dismal a refuge from the
world as possible, and became a hermit in order that he might reflect
upon pious themes without being disturbed by the joyous and other noises
from the nursery, doubtless.

Judging by Pilate and St. Nicholas, there exists no rule for the
construction of hermits; they seem made out of all kinds of material.
But Pilate attended to the matter of expiating his sin while he was
alive, whereas St. Nicholas will probably have to go on climbing down
sooty chimneys, C