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.
Meantime in the English hotels home-played farces, tableaux-
vivants, and even balls enliven the evenings; a charity bazaar
sheds genial consternation; Christmas and New Year are solemnised
with Pantagruelian dinners, and from time to time the young folks
carol and revolve untunefully enough through the figures of a
singing quadrille.
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