Chapter 26

CHAPTER XXVI [The Nest of the Cuckoo-clock]

The Hofkirche is celebrated for its organ concerts. All summer long the
tourists flock to that church about six o'clock in the evening, and pay
their franc, and listen to the noise. They don't stay to hear all of
it, but get up and tramp out over the sounding stone floor, meeting late
comers who tramp in in a sounding and vigorous way. This tramping
back and forth is kept up nearly all the time, and is accented by
the continuous slamming of the door, and the coughing and barking and
sneezing of the crowd. Meantime, the big organ is booming and crashing
and thundering away, doing its best to prove that it is the biggest and
best organ in Europe, and that a tight little box of a church is the
most favorable place to average and appreciate its powers in. It is
true, there were some soft and merciful passages occasionally, but the
tramp-tramp of the tourists only allowed one to get fitful glimpses of
them, so to speak. Then right away the organist would let go another
avalanche.

The commerce of Lucerne consists mainly in gimcrackery of the souvenir
sort; the shops are packed with Alpine crystals, photographs of
scenery, and wooden and ivory carvings. I will not conceal the fact that
miniature figures of the Lion of Lucerne are to be had in them. Millions
of them. But they are libels upon him, every one of them. There is a
subtle something about the majestic pathos of the original which the
copyist cannot get. Even the sun fails to get it; both the photographer
and the carver give you a dying lion, and that is all. The shape is
right, the attitude is right, the proportions are right, but that
indescribable something which makes the Lion of Lucerne the most
mournful and moving piece of stone in the world, is wanting.

The Lion lies in his lair in the perpendicular face of a low cliff--for
he is carved from the living rock of the cliff. His size is colossal,
his attitude is noble. How head is bowed, the broken spear is sticking
in his shoulder, his protecting paw rests upon the lilies of France.
Vines hang down the cliff and wave in the wind, and a clear stream
trickles from above and empties into a pond at the base, and in the
smooth surface of the pond the lion is mirrored, among the water-lilies.

Around about are green trees and grass. The place is a sheltered,
reposeful woodland nook, remote from noise and stir and confusion--and
all this is fitting, for lions do die in such places, and not on granite
pedestals in public squares fenced with fancy iron railings. The Lion of
Lucerne would be impressive anywhere, but nowhere so impressive as where
he is.

Martyrdom is the luckiest fate that can befall some people. Louis XVI
did not die in his