This inn, with the all-but-universal name of Alpenrose, proved a good specimen of the plain, clean, honest and inexpensive Swiss type. We encountered for the first time a system of two-priced table d’hôte, of which we were given our choice, the difference being not in the quality of the food, but in the number of courses. Thus: Will you have soup and one kind of meat with vegetables, followed by fruit, at one franc fifty, or soup, two kinds of meat with vegetables, and salad before the fruit, at two fifty? We chose the cheaper and had plenty, in spite of our fine appetites. Belle Soeur and I were also indulging in one-franc-fifty lodgings for the first time. The boys knew all about them from their experience between Antwerp and Grindelwald.
The dining-room had various Schützenfest prizes hung up around the walls, and we had our ideas of these functions broadened and our appreciation of our own Herr Secundärlehrer’s first prize achievement quickened, when we found that one was labeled the fifty-seventh and another the eighty-first prize!
When we emerged on the dusky balcony after dinner, two mysterious figures were sitting there whom we took to be nuns in some form of religious habit. This theory was shaken when we observed a lighted pipe in the mouth of one, and closer scrutiny developed a moustache on the upper lip of the other. We finally learned from the hotel register that they were German students on a pedestrian trip, the nun-like effect being given by voluminous cloaks with peaked hoods drawn over their heads. They must have been joyous things to carry on a walking trip—worse than the steamer rugs we dragged up the Männlichen!
To our surprise, as soon as it was dark, bonfires began to break forth from surrounding mountain-tops. We asked if this illumination was the regular thing in the Meiringen Valley and learned that the first of August is the Swiss form of Fourth of July and that they were celebrating the oath of the Eidgenossen on the heights of Rütli. They were doing the same thing in Grindelwald and indeed all over the republic.
We wandered into the village to see if any other form of celebration was going on, but it was all as quiet as a Presbyterian Sunday. The only noisy thing we could find was the “Infant Aar” brawling foamily down under a covered wooden bridge. We hung over its parapets for some time, listening to the racket it made and watching the blazing fires along the mountain-tops, while Belle Soeur and I tried to impart such knowledge as we had been able to gather concerning the worthy representatives of the Forest Cantons, Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden, who bound themselves by oath somewhere back in the twelve hundreds, to drive out the Austrians and make their country free. Frater and Antonio did not mind being told, in small doses, but after a brief glance at our improving assortment of Swiss histories, they had politely and firmly declined to read them.
VIII
Our second day’s tramp was perhaps the severest test we met of temper and endurance. We had purposely planned for an easy day—about fourteen miles by excellent highroad (a diligence route) to the Grimsel Hospice. We had four thousand feet to climb, but distributed over fourteen miles of carefully graded road, this was not very terrifying. It was a test only because we had not yet shaken down into the habit of continuous tramping. At Grindelwald, after an all-day’s walk, we always rested the next day. So we got up feeling loggy and lazy, muscles still tired and feet a bit sore. And the situation was made worse by the weather. We had a series of showers to contend against with clouds between whiles.
The rain is the worst thing about Switzerland. Of course if there was not so much of it, the valleys and lower slopes would not be so beautifully green. And sometimes there are several weeks of unbroken sunshine when one feels promoted to Heaven ahead of time. But, on the other hand, one has sometimes a straight fortnight of rain, unspeakably depressing, roads afloat with mud and all the mountains shut out from view. Even the on-and-off showers are trying and apt to trail a skyful of clouds before and after them.