A Zuricher doesn’t eat his supper in silence, his mind full of his business, and after, without a word, put on his hat and overcoat, and with some indistinct reference to a lodge or a council meeting, or “the office,” walk off to a club or beer place, and spend the evening convivially, only to return in the middle of the night, and roll into his bed without knowing or caring whether his wife and children have had a pleasant evening or no.
Not he! On the contrary, he consults his wife at lunch as to whether she prefers a dinner at home or at the gardens. The programmes of the various places are consulted, and it is decided, we will say, that the Tonhalle affords the most ponderous inducement; and so the whole family—father, mother, children, and grandchildren and grandparents, if such there be—go together and dine to the soft pleasings of the lute, or, rather, to the music of a magnificent orchestra.
For, be it known, at all these musical resorts there are superb restaurants, where splendid repasts are served at a very low price, so that in the matter of expense it makes no difference whether a family dines at home or at the public gardens.
THE SWISS WAY.
The whole family sit and chat over their dinner in the jolliest way, listening to, enjoying and discussing the music, and after the dinner there is the long evening over the delightful light wines for the ladies and children, and the heavier beer for the adults; there are cigars for the males, and confections for the women and children, and so on, until the hour comes for home.
These concerts are made up of all kinds of music, from the weightiest classical to the most simple and popular, but the simple and popular is rendered with as much painstaking conscientiousness as the highest. They do “Way down upon the Swanee River” as conscientiously as a selection from Wagner, and as the performance lasts four hours or more there is variety enough to suit every taste.
And then, after it is over, the whole family go home, pleased with their simple enjoyment, and they go home together. The husband does not stop on the way; his enjoyment is with his family, and in his family.
There is no more pleasant sight in Europe than a Swiss or German family around one of these tables, enjoying drinking, music, smoking, and conversation, all at once. Happy people! They have the rare art of gratifying all the senses at once, at less cost than an American can any one singly. The whole cost of an evening in the Tonhalle for a man and his entire family is less than many an American of very moderate means spends upon himself alone, and they get ten times as much out of it as we do.
Tibbitts insisted the first night he was with a German family at one of these places, that he should certainly marry a German girl and settle in Switzerland. When you can dine a large family for a dollar, wine, music and cigars included, was his remark, there is some inducement for having a family. He could afford, if the price of land kept up in Wisconsin, to have an indefinite number of children.
And the Young Man who Knows Everything, who felt the influence of the heady wine he had drank, added, with great gravity: “Better a dinner of herbs on a house-top with a brawling woman, than to dwell with a stalled ox in the tents of wickedness.” It was his time for a quotation.