The Old Saint-Gothard

LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK

Berne, September, 1873.--In Berne again, some eleven
weeks after having left it in July. I have never been in
Switzerland so late, and I came hither innocently supposing the
last Cook's tourist to have paid out his last coupon and
departed. But I was lucky, it seems, to discover an empty cot in
an attic and a very tight place at a table d'hôte. People are all
flocking out of Switzerland, as in July they were flocking in,
and the main channels of egress are terribly choked. I have been
here several days, watching them come and go; it is like the
march-past of an army. It gives one, for an occasional change
from darker thoughts, a lively impression of the numbers of
people now living, and above all now moving, at extreme ease in
the world. Here is little Switzerland disgorging its tens of
thousands of honest folk, chiefly English, and rarely, to judge
by their faces and talk, children of light in any eminent degree;
for whom snow-peaks and glaciers and passes and lakes and chalets
and sunsets and a café complet, "including honey," as the
coupon says, have become prime necessities for six weeks every
year. It's not so long ago that lords and nabobs monopolised
these pleasures; but nowadays i a month's tour in Switzerland is
no more a jeu de prince than a Sunday excursion. To watch
this huge Anglo-Saxon wave ebbing through Berne suggests, no
doubt most fallaciously, that the common lot of mankind isn't
after all so very hard and that the masses have reached a high
standard of comfort. The view of the Oberland chain, as you see
it from the garden of the hotel, really butters one's bread most
handsomely; and here are I don't know how many hundred Cook's
tourists a day looking at it through the smoke of their pipes. Is
it really the "masses," however, that I see every day at the
table d'hôte? They have rather too few h's to the dozen, but
their good-nature is great. Some people complain that they
"vulgarise" Switzerland; but as far as I am concerned I freely
give it up to them and offer them a personal welcome and take a
peculiar satisfaction in seeing them here. Switzerland is a "show
country"--I am more and more struck with the bearings of that
truth; and its use in the world is to reassure persons of a
benevolent imagination when they begin to wish for the drudging
millions a greater supply of elevating amusement. Here is
amusement for a thousand years, and as elevating certainly as
mountains three miles high can make it. I expect to live to see
the summit of Monte Rosa heated by steam-tubes and adorned with a
hotel setting three tables d'hôte a day.

[Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER, BERNE]