snow piles up in
billows, and in the whirling clouds all traces of human occupation are
obliterated. There are many peasants and workingmen who go forth from
Italy into Switzerland and France, and who wish to return home when
their summer labors are over. To these the pass of the Great Saint
Bernard is the only route which they can afford. The long railway
rides and the great distances of the Simplon and the Saint Gotthard
would mean the using up of their scanty earnings. If they go home at
all, they must trust their lives to the storms and the monks, and take
the path which leads by the Hospice. So they come over day after day,
the winter long. No matter how great the storm, the dogs are on the
watch. In the last winter, of the many who came, not one was lost.

[Illustration: The Hospice in winter.]

This is the Hospice as it stands to-day. I come next to tell its story
and the story of its founder. I tell it, in the most part, from a
little volume in French, which some modest and nameless monk of the
Hospice has compiled from the old Latin records of the monks who have
gone before him. This volume he has printed, as he says, "for the use
of the faithful in the parishes which lie next the Alps, and which, in
his time, the good Saint Bernard[1] passed through." This story I must
tell in his own spirit, in some degree at least, else I should have no
right to tell it at all.

In the tenth century, he informs us, the dark ages of Europe could
scarcely have been darker. Weak and wicked kings, the dregs of the
worn-out blood of Charlemagne, misruled France, while along the
northern coast the Normans robbed and plundered at their will. Even
the church had her share of crimes and scandals. In this dark time,
says the chronicle, "God, who had promised to be with His own to the
end of the centuries, did not fail to raise up in that darkness great
saints who should teach the people to lift their eyes toward heaven; to
rise above afflictions; not to take the form of the world for a
permanent habitation, and to suffer its pains with patience, in the
prospect of eternity."

[Illustration: Jupitere.]

It happened that in the days of King Raoul, in the Castle of Menthon,
on the north bank of the lake of Annecy, in Savoy, in the year 923,
Bernard de Menthon was born. His father was the Baron Richard, famous
among the noblemen of the time, while his mother, the Lady Bernoline,
was illustrious for virtues. The young