There are several churches in Lucerne; and this morning I noticed, as I was walking to and from Tivoli, that the clocks of all these churches were keeping time with wonderful exactness. They went so well together, that, in striking the hours and quarters, the last was but a very few seconds behind the first. Is this uniformity the result of their all being regulated and wound up by one authority? If so, will it be so long? As Lucerne is not a town of poor and ignorant peasants, we may suppose that before many years have passed, many of the better sort, intellectually, will have joined the Old Catholic party, or, at all events, will have refused to join the new church of the Infallibilists; and will, therefore, have assumed the regulation of, at least, their own church clocks.
I had gone to Tivoli for a swim in the lake. I found the place more than half a mile distant from the town; and the bath-house inconveniently small and very dilapidated. It seems unaccountable that this should be the only provision of the kind for a population of about 20,000, and for the many thousands of visitors who yearly stay at the place. With this exception—the want, however, appears to be one that is not felt, for at seven this morning I was the only person using the bath-house—the people of Lucerne are doing all that they can for their city. Their quays, bridges, streets, hotels, shops, all show this. They are proud of their city, and have spent much money in making it commodious and handsome. We here, in England, do little or nothing of this kind for our towns; because with us the owners of the land contiguous to a town do not reside in it, and can take no interest in it. With us, therefore, a town—the exceptions are not many—has become merely an agglomeration of workshops, and retail shops, and public-houses, with the residences of the necessary complement of professional men, everyone, however, of whom is determined to get away from the town as soon as he can. If our system is the best, I am sorry that it is so. I had rather see our towns centres of culture and refinement; with more to please the eye, and with greater resources for amusement.
After another excursion into the city this morning, we left Lucerne at 10 A.M. by boat for Alpnach, which, in turn, we left by diligence at 12. It would have been better to have turned out at 4 A.M., and walked over Pilatus to Alpnach. This might have been done easily, and I had thought of it; but had said nothing about it, knowing that I should not be allowed to do it alone; and so Pilatus now stands over for the chances of another day. The mob of tourists at Alpnach, and the confusion among them, were worth seeing. The post office had to provide for them all, for they had booked places at Lucerne, or on board the boat, for Interlaken. They were, eventually, provided for by two diligences, and ten supplementaires. The senior conductor of the two diligences had to arrange all these good people according to their crotchets and parties, and the nature of the means at his disposal. Some would not be separated from their friends. Some were not averse to separation. Some would not go in a diligence. Some would go in the coupé, if they could. Some would not go in a supplementaire, supposing that the diligences would go first. In this, however, they were mistaken, for the officer in command was too old a soldier to allow any of his army of carriages to be in his rear, and wisely, therefore, throughout the day, kept them all before him.
On such an occasion, as on many others in travelling, when many people have to struggle, or think they must, for accommodation, it is amusing to observe the diversity of idiosyncrasies. One man knows the world, and is as cool as a cucumber. It is not worth while putting himself out. He knows that, if he did, he would gain nothing by it. Another takes it for granted that the conductor, who has to go through precisely the same scene every day of his life, knows nothing at all about his business. A third announces, with a display of self-command and assumption of profundity, that everybody in the country is in a conspiracy to cheat and plunder travellers. Some are impressively polite, and hope to gain their point by soft words. Others, who have a low opinion of mankind, put their trust in francs. Some wear a look of helpless resignation. Others, who are of the lucifer-match kind, but not of the kind that ignites only on the box—that is to say, in their own homes, where they have a right to be fiery—explode at once. Collision with anything puts them in a flame. And now you amuse yourself with the way in which they are blazing up, if you are not thereby at all scorched yourself.
At last, all these different specimens of humanity having been provided with seats, just as they would have been had not one of them spoken a word, we got under weigh—an imposing procession of twelve carriages. The horses in some of the supplementaires had been shockingly overworked. The constant straining up hill had so changed the form of their visage, that it was scarcely equine. On noticing this to the conductor, he was of opinion that it would not have been so had they been Swiss horses; they were French horses that had been left behind by Bourbaki’s army; and the effect had resulted from their having been put to work which they had not been used to, and for which they were unfit; but that it was a matter of no great consequence, for the work was killing them fast.
For the two miles beyond Sarnen, there was evidence of how shallow in a Swiss prairie is, generally, the film of good soil. Since I passed by on foot, two or three weeks back, a violent storm-gust had swept over this space, and had thrown down scores of fruit trees. In every instance their roots, which, it appeared, were quite superficial, had lifted the good black soil, and exposed, beneath, the fragments of white rock, on which the soil, to the depth of nowhere more than two feet, had been superimposed, in great part by the industry of many generations of peasants, who had removed the superficial fragments of rock and levelled the good surface. At Eywyl my wife and myself left the diligence, and walked to Lungern, five miles. I again descended at the foot of the Brünig, and walked to the top.
I here saw a black squirrel, the only living wild quadruped I met with during this excursion. Of wild birds also there is to an English eye a surprising dearth in Switzerland. This results in some measure from everyone being allowed to carry a gun, and to use it at all seasons for the destruction of any feathered, or four-footed wild creature that may come in his way; but chiefly from the length of the winter, and dearth of insects, and of plants bearing such seeds and fruits as, at that season, might supply food for birds. During this excursion the only birds I saw were, on several occasions, on open high ground, a solitary little chirper, probably of the finch kind; one jay in the wood—the Aletschwald—on the west side of the Rieder Alp, just above the Aletsch glacier; one coot in a reedy pool in the Valais; a flock of a dozen, or so, rooks eating grapes in a vineyard near Vevey; some gulls on the lake of Geneva; a small covey of red-legged partridges in the valley of the Tessin; in some few towns a few sparrows; and in some a few swallows: no very long catalogue for the distance travelled over. It is a strange thing that you see bee-hives everywhere, but rarely meet with a bee. The whole of the honey, however, that is consumed by travellers in Switzerland is not the product of this little ill-used hymenopteron; for there is, at all events, one factory in a lofty out-of-the-way retreat in the Canton de Vaud—the Swiss are a very ingenious people—where it is produced without insect aid.
We were to sleep at Meiringen: but we found it necessary to go to Brienz, several miles beyond the point on the Brünig where the road branches off to Meiringen, in order to get a private carriage to take us to Meiringen. Just on this part of our way we had to pass through what to those who are unaccustomed to any but English rain-falls would have appeared a surprisingly dark and heavy storm. While we were leaving the diligence at Brienz the darkness and this rain-fall were at their height.
In half an hour the rain had ceased, and our carriage came round to the door of the hotel. My engagement with Ammer was now ended. As I took his hand, and expressed a parting wish for his welfare, his last words were, ‘Sir, if you write a book, put me into it.’ That was not the moment when a man could say no to the harmless request of one who had been his companion for three weeks; and so he returned to Interlaken, to look out for another engagement, in the belief that his request would be complied with. I must, therefore, attempt his portrait. Here it is. He was a tall, bony man, with a long face and grave expression. His talk was that of one who is by nature of an easy simple disposition, but to whom experience has taught that this is a world in which a man must take care of himself. He would rather not have had to do this; but he acquiesced in the necessity of doing it. As to his knowledge of English, he naturally, and allowably enough, overrated it. It was travellers’ English only: nothing more; but for that purpose sufficient. For the only purpose I had in view in engaging him, it was of little or no use. Still, notwithstanding, I held him to be worth his eight francs a day. His polyglot, or rather piebald, or, to be precise, his tortoiseshell, of German, French, and English was, at times, an amusing form of speech. The predominant idea in his mind, the mother idea that gave birth to all others, the focal point to which all lines of thought converged, was that there was nothing in the world like francs. As most of us do, he read others by the light of the knowledge he had of himself. He, therefore, always went on the supposition that nothing could so enhance the merit of his services as some scheme for saving me a franc. This, in his ideas of the scale of duty, came first; and he would be overwhelmed with deep disappointment, mingled with humiliation, whenever, in dealing with porters, voituriers, hotel-keepers, &c., I took matters into my own hands, and did not allow him to make arrangements for effecting this saving. His uncomfortable feelings, however, on these occasions were quickly dissipated by the offering of a cigar—in extreme cases, of two—which he readily accepted, as implying an amount of general approval, friendliness, and liberality sufficient to salve the wound and kill its smart. If I made some small pecuniary acknowledgment he was disposed to think uncalled for, or did not make a reclamation he thought might have been successful, the light that was within him began to be dimmed with uncertainties and confusion. His accustomed landmarks were disappearing. The scent was being lost. He was off the line: the wheels were revolving, but there was no going forward. When at the Hôtel de Ville at Altorf I gave the official a franc for the few square inches of spongy paper, with a few figures printed upon it, his difficulties of this kind culminated. Was I a lunatic or a millionaire? The easiest conclusion—that to which he came—was that I was something of both. ‘There is not,’ he said, meditatively, ‘a man in Uri who would have given that franc for a large volume.’ And then, more confidently, as if he saw, or fancied he saw, a ray of light, ‘But the English are very rich.’ This solution he frequently, afterwards, reverted to. ‘No,’ I would always reply, ‘not so rich as the Swiss, for they can afford to give twice as much as the English for a thousand klafters of land.’ Out of this economical puzzle he could never see his way. The evening before we started he decided that he would draw his pay in one sum, at the conclusion of the engagement. I had proposed to him that he should receive it in weekly payments. He soon, however, began to draw upon me for ten francs at a time. So that, when we had reached Brienz he had, by these payments on account, received a third of the whole. As he knew that I was aware that he must have, originally, taken with him enough for his personal wants, he always gave for these applications, accompanied with many apologies, the reason that he wished to make some additions to his wardrobe. To this, however, I never saw that any additions were made; for his little water-proof sac was always empty; and he returned home in the same clothes, the same billy-cock felt hat, and the same boots in which he had originally set out—all rather marked objects of their kind. I was obliged, therefore, to come to the conclusion, that these successive draughts on account had no purpose but the satisfaction he would receive from having some of the francs in his own actual keeping. If on any occasion he was charged a few cents more than he had expected, or if his dinner and supper had not, in some way or other, been manipulated into my account, for upon this point he was never sufficiently clear, his solemn denunciations, and feeling reprobation, of this strange form of baseness were invariably concluded with the apothegm—I soon knew when to look for it—‘Il y a des voleurs partout.’ This was always announced in precisely the same tone, and with the same heart-chuckle, as if he were announcing a discovery combining the greatest profundity with the greatest novelty, which had just, at that moment, flashed into his own mind, for the first time in the philosophic observation of mankind.
It was his habit to make the Valaisans, on all occasions where it was possible, and at times, too, when the ground of the remark was not discoverable, a butt for the shaft of a depreciatory comparison. If, for instance, we anywhere saw a boy in a pair of sabots, he would say, ‘In the Valais the ladies wear sabots: they only cost them half-a-franc, and last through a summer and winter.’ If he saw the land anywhere ill-cultivated, or a forest ill-managed, or anything done clumsily, wastefully, or neglectfully, he would say, ‘That is arranged badly; that is how it is arranged in the Valais.’ If I talked to him about schools, he would say, ‘We have schools everywhere: but in the Valais they do not teach much.’ I would ask him, ‘Why?’ He would reply, ‘You must ask the priests.’ If we came up with a flock of goats on a mountain pasture, or by the roadside, he would say, ‘The Valaisans keep goats in their forests, to destroy the young trees.’