himself with a substantial lunch and a bottle of English ale.

There is one thing to be said about the English abroad: the variety
is almost infinite. The best acquaintances one makes will be
English,--people with no nonsense and strong individuality; and one
gets no end of entertainment from the other sort. Very different
from the clergyman on the boat was the old lady at table-d'hote in
one of the hotels on the lake. One would not like to call her a
delightfully wicked old woman, like the Baroness Bernstein; but she
had her own witty and satirical way of regarding the world. She had
lived twenty-five years at Geneva, where people, years ago, coming
over the dusty and hot roads of France, used to faint away when they
first caught sight of the Alps. Believe they don't do it now. She
never did; was past the susceptible age when she first came; was
tired of the people. Honest? Why, yes, honest, but very fond of
money. Fine Swiss wood-carving? Yes. You'll get very sick of it.
It's very nice, but I 'm tired of it. Years ago, I sent some of it
home to the folks in England. They thought everything of it; and it
was not very nice, either,--a cheap sort. Moral ideas? I don't care
for moral ideas: people make such a fuss about them lately (this in
reply to her next neighbor, an eccentric, thin man, with bushy
hair, shaggy eyebrows, and a high, falsetto voice, who rallied
the witty old lady all dinner-time about her lack of moral
ideas, and accurately described the thin wine on the table as
"water-bewitched"). Why did n't the baroness go back to England, if
she was so tired of Switzerland? Well, she was too infirm now; and,
besides, she did n't like to trust herself on the railroads. And there
were so many new inventions nowadays, of which she read. What was this
nitroglycerine, that exploded so dreadfully? No: she thought she
should stay where she was.