THE JUNE MEADOWS 65 



is quite impossible to exaggerate. We may use 

 all the adjectives in Webster, yet have we not 

 even then said enough. Acutely conscious of our 

 ineffectual effort, we have, nevertheless, done our 

 best. We could say no more : the rest we must 

 feel, and endeavour that our readers shall feel 

 with us. 



Maybe it is with us as it was with Robert 

 Louis Stevenson when he was at Davos in search 

 of a remedy for the malady that afterwards drove 

 him to Samoa and to an early gi*ave upon her 

 mountains — maybe all our "little fishes talk like 

 whales " ; but, believe us, whale-talk is the only 

 talk befitting. If Stevenson finds " it is the Alps 

 who are to blame," we find it is quite as much 

 the fault of the Alpine flora ; and if Stevenson 

 found comfort in the fact that he was not alone in 

 being forced to " this yeasty inflation, this stiff 

 and strutting architecture of the sentence," so also 

 can we. 



We English are not the only ones to find 

 ourselves at the ineffectual extreme of language. 

 The German tourist — and he is nowadays more 

 enterprisingly early than are we in visiting the 

 Alps — is equally at a loss, as he stands in wonder- 

 ment and, with characteristic emphasis, repeatedly 



