days the League arrives; and I doubt if any person, firm, company,
corporation or league, having provided itself with a seat, ever waited
so long before it came and sat upon it.

You will remember a learned treatise of mine in these pages on the
subject of Lucerne, written in August last, when our PRIME MINISTER
came and sat there. I make my living by writing up the towns of
Switzerland as one by one they get sat on. As there are not more
than half-a-dozen eligible towns in Switzerland, and as we shall have
exhausted two of them in less than half a year, the living I make is
a precarious one; in other words I shall soon be dead. Well, well! A
short life and a merry one, say I. You must admit a touch of subtle
merriment in that word "Genf."

To get to Geneva you provide yourself with a passport, a book of rail
and steamer tickets, a ticket for a seat in the Pulman car, a ticket
for a berth in the sleeping-car and a ticket for the registration of
your luggage. In short, by the time you are in France you will have
had pass through your hands one passport and eleven tickets; and the
first thing you will do upon settling down into the French train is to
compete and intrigue to get a twelfth ticket for your lunch. You will
find that this useless ticket will follow you all the way to Geneva
and will always assert itself when you are accosted by a ticket
inspector. I even know a traveller who arrived eventually at the
Swiss frontier with no other paper of identity or justification; for
a passport which should have given his name, address, motive for
travelling, shape of mouth, size of nose and any other peculiarities,
he could only tender documentary evidence of his having eaten the
nineteenth lunch of the first series of the day before.