Climb as
high as an invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations
nested in the wood. Nor is that all; for about the health resort the
walks are besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids about
their shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys trying to learn to
jodel, and by German couples silently and, as you venture to fancy,
not quite happily, pursuing love's young dream. You may perhaps be
an invalid who likes to make bad verses as he walks about. Alas! no
muse will suffer this imminence of interruption - and at the second
stampede of jodellers you find your modest inspiration fled. Or you
may only have a taste for solitude; it may try your nerves to have
some one always in front whom you are visibly overtaking, and some
one always behind who is audibly overtaking you, to say nothing of a
score or so who brush past you in an opposite direction. It may
annoy you to take your walks and seats in public view. Alas! there
is no help for it among the Alps. There are no recesses, as in
Gorbio Valley by the oil-mill; no sacred solitude of olive gardens on
the Roccabruna-road; no nook upon Saint Martin's Cape, haunted by the
voice of breakers, and fragrant with the threefold sweetness of the
rosemary and the sea-pines and the sea.
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