Giornico, and can call to mind nothing in its way more beautiful:
everything was locked in frost--there was not a watershed but was sheeted
and coated with ice: the road was hard as granite--all was quiet, and
seen as through a dark but incredibly transparent medium. Near Piotta I
met the whole village dragging a large tree; there were many men and
women dragging at it, but they had to pull hard, and they were silent; as
I passed them I thought what comely, well-begotten people they were.
Then, looking up, there was a sky, cloudless and of the deepest blue,
against which the snow-clad mountains stood out splendidly. No one will
regret a walk in these valleys during the depth of winter. But I should
have liked to have looked down from the sun into the sunlessness, as the
old Fate woman at Ronco can do when she sits in winter at her window; or
again, I should like to see how things would look from this same window
on a leaden morning in midwinter after snow has fallen heavily and the
sky is murky and much darker than the earth. When the storm is at its
height, the snow must search and search and search even through the
double windows with which the houses are protected. It must rest upon
the frames of the pictures of saints, and of the sisters "grab," and of
the last hours of Count Ugolino, which adorn the walls of the parlour. No
wonder there is a _S. Maria della Neve_,--a "St. Mary of the Snow;" but I
do wonder that she has not been painted.

I said this to an Italian once, and he said the reason was probably
this--that St. Mary of the Snow was not developed till long after Italian
art had begun to decline. I suppose in another hundred years or so we
shall have a _St. Maria delle Ferrovie_--a St. Mary of the Railways.

From Ronco the path keeps level and then descends a little so as to cross
the stream that comes down from Piora. This is near the village of
Altanca, the church of which looks remarkably well from here. Then there
is an hour and a half's rapid ascent, and at last all on a sudden one
finds oneself on the _Lago Ritom_, close to the hotel.

The lake is about a mile, or a mile and a half, long, and half a mile
broad. It is 6000 feet above the sea, very deep at the lower end, and
does not freeze where the stream issues from it, so that the magnificent
trout with which it abounds can get air and live through the winter. In
many other lakes, as, for example, the _Lago di Tremorgio_, they cannot
do t