A Little Swiss Sojourn

A Little Swiss Sojourn

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Title: A Little Swiss Sojourn
Author: W. D. Howells
Release Date: June 12, 2006 [EBook #18565]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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A LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN
BY W. D. HOWELLS

ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 1893

ILLUSTRATIONS
Tourists at Montreux (frontispiece)
Sign of the White Cross Inn
Entrance to Villeneuve
Post-office, Villeneuve
The Castle of Chillon
A Railroad Servant
A Bit of Villeneuve
The Prisoner of Chillon
One of the Fountains
"They helped to make the hay in the marshes"
Cattle at the Fountains
Washing Clothes in the Lake
Flirtation at the Fountains
The Wine-press
Castle of Aigle
The Market at Vevay

The Market, Vevay--A Bargain before the Notary
Germans at Montreux
Church Terrace, Montreux
Tour up the Lake

A LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN

First Paper
[Illustration: Sign of the White Cross Inn]
I
Out of eighty or ninety days that we passed in Switzerland there must
have been at least ten that were fair, not counting the forenoons before
it began to rain, and the afternoons when it cleared up. They said that it
was an unusually rainy autumn, and we could well believe it; yet I
suspect that it rains a good deal in that little corner of the Canton Vaud
even when the autumn is only usually rainy. We arrived late in
September and came away early in December, and during that time we
had neither the fevers that raged in France nor the floods that raged in
Italy. We Vaudois were rather proud of that, but whether we had much
else to be proud of I am not so certain. Of course we had our Alpine
scenery, and when the day was fair the sun came loafing up over the
eastern mountains about ten o'clock in the morning, and lounged down
behind the western tops about half-past three, after dinner. But then he
left the eternal snows of the Dent-du-Midi all flushed with his light,
and in the mean time he had glittered for five hours on the "bleu
impossible" of the Lake of Geneva, and had shown in a hundred
changing lights and shadows the storied and sentimentalized towers of
the Castle of Chillon. Solemn groups and ranks of Swiss and Savoyard
Alps hemmed the lake in as far as the eye could reach, and the

lateen-sailed craft lent it their picturesqueness, while the steamboats
constantly making its circuit and stopping at all the little towns on the
shores imparted a pleasant modern interest to the whole effect, which
the trains of the railroad running under the lee of the castle agreeably
heightened.
II
The Swiss railroad was always an object of friendly amusement with
the children, who could not get used to having the trains started by a
small Christmas-horn. They had not entirely respected the English
engine, with the shrill falsetto of its whistle, after the burly roar of our
locomotives; and the boatswain's pipe of the French conductor had
considerably diminished the dignity of a sister republic in their minds;
but this Christmas-horn was too droll. That a grown man, much more
imposingly uniformed than an American general, should blow it to start
a real train of cars was the source of patriotic sarcasm whenever its
plaintive, reedy note was heard. We had come straight through from
London, taking the sleeping-car at Calais, and rolling and bounding
over the road towards Basle in a fashion that provoked scornful
comparisons with the Pullman that had carried us so smoothly from
Boston to Buffalo. It is well to be honest, even to our own adulation,
and one must confess that the sleeping-car of the European continent is
but the nervous and hysterical daughter of the American mother of
sleeping-cars. Many express trains are run without any sleeper, and the
charges for berths are ludicrously extravagant--five dollars apiece for a
single night. It is not strange that the native prefers to doze away the
night bolt-upright, or crouched into the corners of his repellently
padded carriage, rather than toss upon the expensive pallet of the
sleeping-car, which seems hung rather with a view to affording
involuntary exercise than promoting dear-bought slumber. One
advantage of it is that