TO ENGELBERG AND BACK.
Being a few Notes taken en route in search of a Perfect Cure.
"Oh! he's ever so much better. Why he only had two stumbles, and one cropper, doing his three hundred yards this morning. That beats the record, anyhow."
Young JERRYMAN is describing the effect the Engelberg air is already having on the Dilapidated One to several people, who have either been invalided themselves, or have had invalid relatives, or met, seen, or heard of invalids who have had similar satisfactory experiences.
"You know, I think the dining has a great deal to do with the beneficent effects of the place," remarked, meekly, a mild-mannered Clergyman, who, had been brought up here apparently to "get tone." "You can't sit down to table with three hundred people," he continued, meditatively; as if the solution of the social problem had caused him some anxious thought, "without being inclined to launch out a little more than one does under ordinary conditions at home. Only I wish they wouldn't think it necessary to keep their dining-saloon at such an excessive temperature, and waste quite so much time between the different courses."
And here the mild-mannered Clergyman had real ground for complaint; for the German recipe for table d'hôte dinner seems to be something very much like the following:—Get a room that has been smoked in, with closed and tightly-fastened windows and doors, all the morning. Light the stove, if there is one, and turn on the gas, if there is any. You begin your dinner. Take twice, thrice, or, even four times of every course, glaring savagely and defiantly at your neighbour as you pass the dish. Sit over each, allowing a good quarter of an hour for its proper digestion, and keep this up till the perspiration drops from your face. Finally, in about two hours' time, having carefully mopped your forehead, quit the table for the "Conversations Saal." Here (still keeping in gas and stove, if there is one) smoke till you can't see six feet before you. Keep this up till you have had enough of it, and feel the time is getting on for you to go through a modified edition of the same process at supper. At least, this is how the German element—a very formidable one at the Hôtel Titlis—for the most part, conducted itself over the principal meal of the day. There were, of course, exceptions, for all Germany is not essentially German; yet it must be confessed that the prevailing features were of this guzzling, and, for the want of a more descriptive word, I would add, "sweltering" type, not fully appreciated by the ordinary travelling Briton, who, whatever else he may be, is not a gross feeder, though he does set the proper value on a breath of pure fresh air.
"Get him up? Of course we can get him up," rejoined Dr. MELCHISIDEC, warmly. This in answer to some doubts expressed by one of the more cautions spirits of our party as to the possibility of dragging the Dilapidated One over one of the stock excursions of the neighbourhood, to wit, the Fürren Alp. "Why, put him into a chaise à porteur, and we could get him up the Titlis itself, and throw in the Schlossstock, and the Gross-Spannort, for the matter of that, as well. Baedeker makes only a two and a half hours' affair of it."
And so we find ourselves in due course, doing the "Fürren-Alp" in approved style.
"By Jove, I'll be hanged if I think it's a bit better than going up Primrose Hill, twenty times running: and not near such good going either," observes young JERRYMAN, after we have been struggling up a precipitous mountain path, occasionally finding ourselves sliding and slipping backwards in the bed of a disused watercourse, for about two hours and a half.
And really I think young JERRYMAN's view of the matter is not so very far out, after all.
ONE RITE, AND ALL WRONG.—The "Service of Reconciliation" in St. Paul's seems to have had the effect of setting everyone by the ears. Quite a muddle,—a Western Church, and an Easton rite.