Or perhaps from across storied and
malarious Italy, a wind cunningly winds about the mountains and
breaks, warm and unclean, upon our mountain valley. Every nerve is
set ajar; the conscience recognises, at a gust, a load of sins and
negligences hitherto unknown; and the whole invalid world huddles
into its private chambers, and silently recognises the empire of the
Fohn.
CHAPTER XI - ALPINE DIVERSIONS
THERE will be no lack of diversion in an Alpine sanitarium. The
place is half English, to be sure, the local sheet appearing in
double column, text and translation; but it still remains half
German; and hence we have a band which is able to play, and a company
of actors able, as you will be told, to act. This last you will take
on trust, for the players, unlike the local sheet, confine themselves
to German and though at the beginning of winter they come with their
wig-boxes to each hotel in turn, long before Christmas they will have
given up the English for a bad job. There will follow, perhaps, a
skirmish between the two races; the German element seeking, in the
interest of their actors, to raise a mysterious item, the KUR-TAXE,
which figures heavily enough already in the weekly bills, the English
element stoutly resisting.
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