Val
Leventina.

They are near Faido, but I cannot further identify them.

32. Oil Painting: Calonico.

_Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. v.

33. Oil Painting: Tengia.

_Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. iv.

34. Oil Painting: Prato.

Other views of Prato appear in _Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. iii.

35. Oil Painting: Lago Tom, Piora, Val Leventina. 1877.

Ch. vi. in _Alps and Sanctuaries_ is headed "Piora." "Piora in fact is a
fine breezy upland valley of singular beauty, and with a sweet atmosphere
of cow about it." Butler thought he knew what went on in Piora and, as
he proceeds through the valley, he says: "Here I heard that there were
people, and the people were not so much asleep as the simple peasantry of
these upland valleys are expected to be by nine o'clock in the evening.
For now was the time when they had moved up from Ronco, Altanca, and
other villages in some numbers to cut the hay, and were living for a
fortnight or three weeks in the chalets upon the Lago di Cadagna. As I
have said, there is a chapel, but I doubt whether it is attended during
this season with the regularity with which the parish churches of Ronco,
Altanca, etc., are attended during the rest of the year. The young
people, I am sure, like these annual visits to the high places, and will
be hardly weaned from them. Happily the hay will always be there, and
will have to be cut by someone, and the old people will send the young
ones."

The foregoing passage throws light upon that other passage in _Life and
Habit_, ch. ii., about S. Paul, which concludes thus: "But the true
grace, with her groves and high places, and troops of young men and
maidens crowned with flowers, and singing of love and youth and wine--the
true grace he drove out into the wilderness--high up, it may be, into
Piora, and into such-like places. Happy they who harboured her in her
ill report."

After Ernest has received Alethea's money, and while he and Edward
Overton are returning from Christina's funeral, in ch. lxxxiv. of _The
Way of All Flesh_, he tells his godfather his plans for spending the next
year or two. He has formed a general impression that the most vigorous
and amiable of known nations--the modern Italians, the old Greeks and
Romans, and the South Sea Islanders--have not been purists. He wants to
find out what such people do; they are the practical authorities on the
question--What is best for man?

"Let us," he says, "settle the fact first and