Household Stories from the Land of Hofer

Surrounded from their earliest years with living pictures of Nature's choicest forms and colouring, they need no popular fiction to cultivate their imagination, no schools of design to educate their taste. Shut out from the world's ambitions by their pathless Alps, they have learned to see before them two aims alone, -to maintain the integrity and the sanctity of their humble homes on earth, and to obtain one day a place in that better Home above, to which the uplifted fingers of their sun-bathed mountain-peaks ever gloriously point. The paramount claims on their hearts' allegiance of the hearth and the altar are inseparably interwoven in their social code, and their creed scarcely knows of a distinction between Nature and Nature's God.