"Damnation!" he said at last, solemnly, and turned his back.
One morning, shortly after this, Rowland and Roderick took a long walk.
They had walked before in a dozen different directions, but they had not yet crossed a charming little wooded pass, which shut in their valley on one side and descended into the vale of Engelberg.

In coming from Lucerne they had approached their inn by this path, and, feeling that they knew it, had hitherto neglected it in favor of untrodden ways.

But at last the list of these was exhausted, and Rowland proposed the walk to Engelberg as a novelty.

The place is half bleak and half pastoral; a huge white monastery rises abruptly from the green floor of the valley and complicates its picturesqueness with an element rare in Swiss scenery.

Hard by is a group of chalets and inns, with the usual appurtenances of a prosperous Swiss resort--lean brown guides in baggy homespun, lounging under carved wooden galleries, stacks of alpenstocks in every doorway, sun-scorched Englishmen without shirt-collars.