Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/69

Rh its congregation. What a sermon is this poor woman's sick bed!

Our large bee-hive becomes more and more populous with guests from many lands. Whole schools come hither, that the young girls may enjoy the fresh, country air for one or two weeks. Whilst the girls ramble through the valleys, the youths climb the ridges and summits of the mountains, making long and laborious excursions. And now and then, even a spirited young girl will accompany her father and brother on similar mountain rambles, and is in so doing as brave as the bravest.

A great number of the guests here are English families, mostly abounding in daughters. I regarded with somewhat melancholy foreboding, the future of a flock of six young sisters, between the ages of twelve and twenty, thinking how they would be able to find, each one for herself, space and a sphere of activity, without which no one can be happy in the world. One of these girls, my neighbor at the table, very tall, although still young, with a grave countenance, and wearing spectacles, and who blushed every time she spoke or was spoken to, seemed to me no unworthy candidate for a professor's chair,—but—— But the young girls practically replied to my “how” and my “but.” M. Becket, who had long wished to establish a Sunday-school in Rossinières, announced, the preceding Sunday, from the pulpit, that this would now be commenced. The primitive population, some so young that they could scarcely talk, flocked with great curiosity to the school-house, and here I saw, to my