and in soft weather people sit at little tables there; otherwise they
take their ices inside the café, and all the same look out on the
Dent-du-Midi, and feel so bored with everybody that they are just in the
humor to be interested in anybody. There is a very pretty theatre in the
Kursaal, where they seldom give entertainments, but where, if you ever
go, you see numbers of pretty girls, and in a box a pale,
delicate-looking middle-aged Englishman in a brown velvet coat, with his
two daughters. The concert will be very good, and a young man of
cultivated sympathies and disdainful tastes could have a very pleasant
time there. For the rest, Montreux offers to the novelist's hand perhaps
the crude American of the station who says it is the cheapest place he
has struck, and he is going to stick it out there awhile; perhaps the
group of chattering American school-girls; perhaps the little Jewish
water-color painter who tells of his narrow escape from the mad dog,
which having broken his chain at Bouveret, had bitten six persons on the
way to Clarens, and been killed by the gendarmes near Vevay; perhaps two
Englishwomen who talk for half an hour about their rooms at the hotel,
and are presently joined by their husbands, who pursue the subject.
These are the true features of modern travel, and for a bit of pensive
philosophy, or to have a high-bred, refined widow with a fading sorrow
encountered by a sensitive nature of the other sex, there is no better
place than the sad little English church-yard at Montreux. It is full of
the graves of people who have died in the search for health far from
home, and it has a pathos therefore which cannot be expressed. The
stones grow stained and old under the laurels and hollies, and the
rain-beaten ivy creeps and drips all over the grassy mounds. Yes, that
is a beautiful, lonely, heart-breaking place. Now and again I saw
black-craped figures silently standing there, and paid their grief the
tribute of a stranger's pang as I passed, happy with my children by my
side.