Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/61

Rh forget them, by reading in my Swiss history, yet I freeze and am “in a dreadful temper.” O, sun! sun! If one longs for thee on the plain, how much more here in the narrow valley, of which thou art the joy, and which without thee is only a hideous pit! Can the sun actually shine here? “Pays d'en haut” seems to me to be only a country up in the clouds, and such clouds! I never saw any thing like them. They hang like black crape over the heights; they roll in heavy masses down before them this—hu, hu, hu!

The 12th.—“Thou showest thyself once more, monarch of day, and joy of the earth, beloved, longed-for sun!” This commenced a sort of prose poem in which I this morning attempted to describe the combat between the sun and a huge gray cloud which would interrupt it, but which I shall not inflict on my reader. It is sufficient to say that the sun conquered the gray cloud; it fled away in scattered fragments over the mountains, and I, delighted, wandered in the sunshine, into the valley, saluted the flowers which raised their tear-drenched heads, and the trees which clapped their hands above them, and the heights which shone out in smaragdus green towards the blue heavens, and the castle whose bells rang jocundly from the mountains, and the country people, who were making hay along the banks of the rushing Sarine.

“There seems to be a heavy crop this year,” I said, in passing by.

“Yes,” replied they, “it has not been so good for these many years. And every thing else in the fields promises well! ”

And they tossed the mown grass aloft in the air,