rucifix, and we pleased ourselves with the fancy that when the ships
come in that we sent out as children--laden with hopes that were to be
bartered for treasures--we would return, and hang the walls with
pictures, and make the whole place wonderful in the eyes that had seen
only its bareness. The shower the night before had laid the dust, and
the drive that morning was most enjoyable. Following the course of the
noisy Rhone, we reached Sierre at noon, where we left the carriages with
regret, and took the railway train to Martigny.

CHAPTER XIV.

AMONG THE EVERLASTING HILLS.

The quaint inn.--The Falls of the Sallenches, and
the Gorge de Trient.--Shopping in a Swiss
village.--A mule ride to Chamouni.--Peculiarities
of the animals.--Entrance to the
village.--Egyptian mummies lifted from the
mules.--Rainy days.--Chamois.--The Mer de
Glace.--"Look out of your window."--Mont
Blanc.--Sallenches.--A diligence ride to
Geneva.--Our little old woman.--The clownish
peasant.--The fork in the road.--"Adieu."

OUR hotel here at Martigny, was even more suggestive of romance than the
one at Brieg. It had been a monastery, and was an old, yellow-washed
structure facing the street, with a rambling garden surrounded by high
walls, clinging to it in the rear. Low, dark rooms, with bare, unpainted
floors, like the waves of the sea in smoothness, were given to some of
our party, while Mrs. K. and I were consigned again, with singular
appropriateness, to what had been the chapel. Its windows overlooked the
straggling, half-dead trees, and bare, hard-baked earth of the open
space before the door, which was always being crossed by strings of
mules ornamented with bright saddle-cloths, and still further with the
ubiquitous tourist arrayed in every known costume of the period.
Village girls, too, passed under the trees, knitting as they went, and
horrible creatures afflicted with the _goitre_--that curse of this
region--which we met at every turn now.

To gain the long, low refectory where we dined, or to pass from one room
to another, necessitated crossing the brick-paved cloisters, upon which
all the doors of the second story opened. Here a row of columns
encircled a narrow, inner court-yard--so narrow as to be nothing more
than a slit in the walls, yet wide enough to allow the shimmering
sunlight to drop down upon the vines twine