We balked at the last-named, but ordered a large supply of everything else. As soon as the maid brought it in, we told her to begin getting ready a second installment just as large. And how we did eat! Was ever anything so good as that bread and butter and honey, except the long drafts of café-au-lait that washed it down?
All day long my health had been improving and my cold disappearing, and this ambrosial meal seemed to complete the cure. We asked for soap, water and towels, combed our hair before a looking-glass, put on clean collars, and looked so respectable that we hardly knew each other. For myself, I felt as if I had just returned to life and the joy of it from a most unpleasant dream. The treatment I had given my influenza had been heroic,—a sort of kill-or-cure. But it had happened to cure, and in a phenomenally short time. The rest of the family, who took their share comfortably at home, also took longer to get over it.
Greatly refreshed, we left the “rustic inn” of blessed memory and swung happily down the path past the pretty Iffigen waterfalls. We soon found ourselves on a wagon-road which led us in the course of a few miles to Lenk, a village of considerable size with thermal springs and the attendant hotels and health-seekers. The specialty here is throat and nose trouble.
We spent the night at Lenk and in the morning walked the eight and a half miles down the valley to Zweisimmen.
Bach Lake (Faulhorn Route)
The Simmenthal is famous for its cattle, and as we happened to have struck the day on which they were coming home from the high pastures, the whole eight and a half miles was through a procession of moist milky cattle. Sometimes they filled the road so that it required ingenuity to get past. They were big, handsome, sleek creatures, and seemed to be perfectly gentle.
The Rawyl wilderness separates not only the two cantons, but the two languages as with a sharp knife. There is no lapping over at the edges. The herdsmen at Nieder Rawyl spoke French, but no German, and the waitress at Iffigen Alp spoke German and never a word of French.
Zweisimmen is the railway terminus. Here we took train to Spiez, and hence to Interlaken and home in the usual manner.
Thus ended the second trip.