After passing Lausanne, Lake Leman is left behind and we go nearly due north to Friburg, a beautiful town situated on a rocky eminence and nearly surrounded by the River Sarine.
Friburg, like every Swiss city, has its organ and legend. The organ is one of the finest of Europe, and is played every afternoon and evening, provided the admissions amount to twenty francs. If there is not the vast amount of four dollars in the house the curtain does not go up, or rather, there is no performance. However, there are generally enough tourists present to justify the performance, and the listener is well rewarded for the expenditure of time.
In front of the council house is an immense lime tree, partly supported by stone pillars. It has its legend. It is said that a young man of Friburg—a participant in the great victory of Morat, in the year 1476, was sent after the battle to convey the glad news to his townsmen. He arrived, breathless and exhausted, so much so that he had just strength left to gasp the word “Victory!” and expired. There was in his lifeless hand a lime twig which the citizens planted, and it grew to be the patriarch of trees it now is, and it is guarded with as much care as though the legend were actually true.
How many in our late war ran from battle-fields, who might have had lime twigs in their hands if they had waited long enough to get them. But they did not. They were in too great a hurry to reach Canada, from which they will all (1882) return to claim pensions under the arrearages of pensions act.
BERNE AND BEARS.
It would have been well for the country if all of this class had imitated the example of the young man of Friburg, and expired. The citizens could well have afforded the time to plant the twigs in their hands.
Only a short stop is made here, and then to Berne, one of the most interesting cities in Switzerland.
Berne is the city of bears, and were it located in Wisconsin would be called Bearville. A bear was its origin. Berthold DeZahringen, some centuries ago, killed a tremendous bear on the ground now occupied by the pretty city, and founded a town in commemoration of the event, and so the bear became as common in Berne as the lion is in England, or the eagle in America. There is bear everywhere. The public decorations are in the form of bears, the flags have bears on them, the bread is stamped with bears, the pot you drink your beer out of is in form a bear; the children’s toys are all bears, and the city keeps two bear-pits, in which a dozen, more or less, fine specimens are kept. Not many years ago an English officer, who, with his lately wedded bride, were doing Switzerland, fell into one of these pits, and after a desperate struggle with the ferocious brutes, was literally torn to pieces in the sight of his agonized wife. I could not learn who it was the heart-broken wife married the next year, or whether she married well or not.
It is a quaint and curious old city, and well worth a day or two. The situation is particularly beautiful, and as it has preserved the peculiar characteristics of the long ago, it is an instructive place.
In the older section the streets have no sidewalks, the ground floors being made into arcades, with the houses above supported upon arches, under which you walk. It is always well for an American to visit the older portions of these cities, that he may more fervently thank heaven that his lot was cast in a new country, where there is no ancient and inconvenient rubbish to worry him. There is more of convenience in any one modern American house than there is in all of the old part Berne, or, for that matter, of any ancient city. They do well to look at, but that is all the use they should be put to. I have a profound sympathy for the people condemned to live in them.