in the boarding-houses. Here are Russian and Polish counts with long
mustaches, and pins set with false brilliants; Englishmen with fishes'
or horses' heads; Englishwomen with the figures of angels or of
giraffes; Parisian women, daintily attired, sprightly, and coquettish;
American women, free in their bearing, and eccentric in their dress, and
their men as stiff as the smoke-pipes of steamboats; German women, with
languishing voices, drooping and pale like willow branches, fair-haired
and blue-eyed, talking in the same breath of Goethe and the price of
sausages, of the moon and their glass of beer, of stars and black
radishes. And here and there are a few little Swiss girls, fresh and
rosy as wood strawberries, smiling darlings like Dresden shepherdesses,
dreaming of scenes of platonic love in a great garden adorned with the
statue of William Tell or General Dufour.


ZURICH[34]

BY W.D. M'CRACKAN

If you arrive in Zurich after dark, and pass along the river-front,
you will think yourself for a moment in Venice. The street lamps glow
responsively across the dark Limmat, or trail their light from the
bridges. In the uncertain darkness, the bare house walls of the farther
side put on the dignity of palaces. There are unsuspected architectural
glories in the Wasserkirche and the Rathhaus, as they stand partly in
the water of the river. And if, at such times, one of the long, narrow
barges of the place passes up stream, the illusion is complete; for, as
the boat cuts at intervals through the glare of gaslight it looks for
all the world like a gondola....