And after lunch too! I ceased to listen, flicked the end of my
cigarette ash over the green trellis of the arbour, stretched my
legs with a fine restfulness, leant back, and gave my mind to the
fields and houses that lay adown the valley.

What I saw interwove with fragmentary things our garrulous friend
had said, and with the trend of my own speculations....

The high road, with its tramways and its avenues on either side, ran
in a bold curve, and with one great loop of descent, down the
opposite side of the valley, and below crossed again on a beautiful
viaduct, and dipped into an arcade in the side of the Bristenstock.
Our inn stood out boldly, high above the level this took. The houses
clustered in their collegiate groups over by the high road, and near
the subordinate way that ran almost vertically below us and past us
and up towards the valley of the Meien Reuss. There were one or two
Utopians cutting and packing the flowery mountain grass in the
carefully levelled and irrigated meadows by means of swift, light
machines that ran on things like feet and seemed to devour the
herbage, and there were many children and a woman or so, going to
and fro among the houses near at hand. I guessed a central building
towards the high road must be the school from which these children
were coming. I noted the health and cleanliness of these young heirs
of Utopia as they passed below.

The pervading quality of the whole scene was a sane order, the
deliberate solution of problems, a progressive intention steadily
achieving itself, and the aspect that particularly occupied me was
the incongruity of this with our blond-haired friend.