Chapter 25 - Page 2

public confidence.

Lucerne is a charming place. It begins at the water's edge, with a
fringe of hotels, and scrambles up and spreads itself over two or three
sharp hills in a crowded, disorderly, but picturesque way, offering
to the eye a heaped-up confusion of red roofs, quaint gables, dormer
windows, toothpick steeples, with here and there a bit of ancient
embattled wall bending itself over the ridges, worm-fashion, and here
and there an old square tower of heavy masonry. And also here and there
a town clock with only one hand--a hand which stretches across the dial
and has no joint in it; such a clock helps out the picture, but you
cannot tell the time of day by it. Between the curving line of hotels
and the lake is a broad avenue with lamps and a double rank of low shade
trees. The lake-front is walled with masonry like a pier, and has
a railing, to keep people from walking overboard. All day long the
vehicles dash along the avenue, and nurses, children, and tourists sit
in the shade of the trees, or lean on the railing and watch the schools
of fishes darting about in the clear water, or gaze out over the lake
at the stately border of snow-hooded mountains peaks. Little pleasure
steamers, black with people, are coming and going all the time; and
everywhere one sees young girls and young men paddling about in fanciful
rowboats, or skimming along by the help of sails when there is any wind.
The front rooms of the hotels have little railed balconies, where one
may take his private luncheon in calm, cool comfort and look down upon
this busy and pretty scene and enjoy it without having to do any of the
work connected with it.

Most of the people, both male and female, are in walking costume, and
carry alpenstocks. Evidently, it is not considered safe to go about in
Switzerland, even in town, without an alpenstock. If the tourist forgets
and comes down to breakfast without his alpenstock he goes back and gets
it, and stands it up in the corner. When his touring in Switzerland is
finished, he does not throw that broomstick away, but lugs it home
with him, to the far corners of the earth, although this costs him
more trouble and bother than a baby or a courier could. You see, the
alpenstock is his trophy; his name is burned upon it; and if he has
climbed a hill, or jumped a brook, or traversed a brickyard with it,
he has the names of those places burned upon it, too. Thus it is his
regimental flag, so to speak, and bears the record of his achievements.
It is worth three francs when he buys it, but a bonanza could not
purchase it after his great deeds have been inscribed upon it. There are
artisans all about Switzerland whose trade it is to burn these things
upon the alpenstock of the tourist. And observe,