I met the ladies afterwards in Lausanne. They told me they had been condemned to a fine of forty francs apiece. They also explained to me that they had not the slightest intention of paying it.
CHAPTER VII
Too much Postcard.
The postcard craze is dying out in Germany—the land of its birth—I am told. In Germany they do things thoroughly, or not at all. The German when he took to sending postcards abandoned almost every other pursuit in life. The German tourist never knew where he had been until on reaching home again he asked some friend or relation to allow him to look over the postcards he had sent. Then it was he began to enjoy his trip.
“What a charming old town!” the German tourist would exclaim. “I wish I could have found time while I was there to have gone outside the hotel and have had a look round. Still, it is pleasant to think one has been there.”
“I suppose you did not have much time?” his friend would suggest.
“We did not get there till the evening,” the tourist would explain. “We were busy till dark buying postcards, and then in the morning there was the writing and addressing to be done, and when that was over, and we had had our breakfast, it was time to leave again.”
He would take up another card showing the panorama from a mountain top.
“Sublime! colossal!” he would cry enraptured. “If I had known it was anything like that, I’d have stopped another day and had a look at it.”
It was always worth seeing, the arrival of a party of German tourists in a Schwartzwald village. Leaping from the coach they would surge round the solitary gendarme.