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