The secret of the fertile meadows is the most
thorough irrigation. Water is carried along the banks from the river,
and distributed by numerous sluiceways below; and above, the little
mountain streams are brought where they are needed by artificial
channels. Old men and women in the fields were constantly changing the
direction of the currents. All the inhabitants appeared to be porters:
women were transporting on their backs baskets full of soil; hay was
being backed to the stables; burden-bearers were coming and going upon
the road: we were told that there are only three horses in the place.
There is a pleasant girl who brings us luncheon at the inn; but the
inhabitants for the most part are as hideous as those we see all day:
some have hardly the shape of human beings, and they all live in the
most filthy manner in the dirtiest habitations. A chalet is a sweet
thing when you buy a little model of it at home.

After we leave Stalden, the walk becomes more picturesque, the
precipices are higher, the gorges deeper. It required some engineering
to carry the footpath round the mountain buttresses and over the
ravines. Soon the village of Emd appears on the right,--a very
considerable collection of brown houses, and a shining white
church-spire, above woods and precipices and apparently unscalable
heights, on a green spot which seems painted on the precipices; with
nothing visible to keep the whole from sliding down, down, into the
gorge of the Visp. Switzerland may not have so much population to the
square mile as some countries; but she has a population to some of
her square miles that would astonish some parts of the earth's
surface elsewhere. Farther on we saw a faint, zigzag footpath, that we
conjectured led to Emd; but it might lead up to heaven. All day we had
been solicited for charity by squalid little children, who kiss their
nasty little paws at us, and ask for centimes. The children of Emd,
however, did not trouble us. It must be a serious affair if they ever
roll out of bed.

Late in the afternoon thunder began to tumble about the hills, and
clouds snatched away from our sight the snow-peaks at the end of the
valley; and at length the rain fell on those who had just arrived and
on the unjust. We took refuge from the hardest of it in a lonely chalet
high up on the hillside, where a roughly dressed, frowzy Swiss, who
spoke bad German, and said he was a schoolmaster, gave us a bench in the
shed of his schoolro