t feet wide. I was told that in some of the
receptacles of this kind in the Swiss villages, the skulls were all
marked, and if a man wished to find the skulls of his ancestors for
several generations back, he could do it by these marks, preserved in
the family records.

An English gentleman who had lived some years in this region, said it
was the cradle of compulsory education. But he said that the English
idea that compulsory education would reduce bastardy and intemperance
was an error--it has not that effect. He said there was more seduction
in the Protestant than in the Catholic cantons, because the confessional
protected the girls. I wonder why it doesn't protect married women in
France and Spain?

This gentleman said that among the poorer peasants in the Valais, it was
common for the brothers in a family to cast lots to determine which
of them should have the coveted privilege of marrying, and his
brethren--doomed bachelors--heroically banded themselves together to
help support the new family.

We left Zermatt in a wagon--and in a rain-storm, too--for St. Nicholas
about ten o'clock one morning. Again we passed between those grass-clad
prodigious cliffs, specked with wee dwellings peeping over at us from
velvety green walls ten and twelve hundred feet high. It did not seem
possible that the imaginary chamois even could climb those precipices.
Lovers on opposite cliffs probably kiss through a spy-glass, and
correspond with a rifle.

In Switzerland the farmer's plow is a wide shovel, which scrapes up and
turns over the thin earthy skin of his native rock--and there the man of
the plow is a hero. Now here, by our St. Nicholas road, was a grave, and
it had a tragic story. A plowman was skinning his farm one morning--not
the steepest part of it, but still a steep part--that is, he was not
skinning the front of his farm, but the roof of it, near the eaves--when
he absent-mindedly let go of the plow-handles to moisten his hands, in
the usual way; he lost his balance and fell out of his farm backward;
poor fellow, he never touched anything till he struck bottom, fifteen
hundred feet below. [This was on a Sunday.--M.T.] We throw a halo of
heroism around the life of the soldier and the sailor, because of the
deadly dangers they are facing all the time. But we are not used to
looking upon farming as a heroic occupation. This is because we have not
lived in Switzerland.

From St. Nicholas we struck out for Visp--