As I was quite fresh (having worked chiefly the sails on Zug) and now in good "training," so as to get on very comfortably with ten or twelve hours' rowing in the day, I spent it all in seeing this inexhaustible Lake of Lucerne, and yet felt that at least a dozen new pictures had been left unseen in this rich volume of the book of nature.
But as this book had no page in it about quarters for the night it was time to consider these homely affairs, and to look out for an hotel; not one of the big barracks for Englishmen spoken of before, but some quiet place where one could stop for Sunday. Coming suddenly then round a shady point, behold the very place! But can it be an hotel? Yes, there is the name, "Seeburg." Is it quiet? Observe the shady walks. Bathing? Why, there is a bath in the lake at the end of the garden. Fishing? At least four rods are stretched over the reeds by hopeful hands, and with earnest looks behind, watching for the faintest nibble.
Let us run boldly in. Ten minutes, and the boat is safely in a shed, and its captain well housed in an excellent room; and, having ordered dinner, it was delicious to jump into the lake for a swim, all hot with the hot day's work, and to stretch away out to the deep, and circle round and round in these limpid waters, with a nice little bath-room to come back to, and fresh dry clothes to put on. In the evening we had very pretty English music, a family party improvised in an hour, and broken up for a moonlight walk, while, all this time (one fancied), in the big hotel of the town the guests were in stiff coteries, or each set retired to its sitting-room, and lamenting how unsociable everybody else had become.
I never was more comfortable than here, with a few English families "en pension," luxuriating for the sum of six francs per day, and an old Russian General, most warlike and courteous, who would chat with you by the hour, on the seat under the shady chestnut, and smiled at the four persevering fishermen whose bag consisted, I believe, of three bites, one of them allowed on all hands to have been bonâ fide.
Then on Sunday we went to Lucerne, to church, where a large congregation listened to a very good sermon from the well-known Secretary of the Society for Colonial and Continental Churches. At least every traveller, if not every home-stayed Englishman, ought to support this Association, because it many times supplies just that food and rest which the soul needs so much on a Sunday abroad, when the pleasures of foreign travel are apt to make only the mind and body constitute the man.
I determined to paddle from Lucerne by the river Reuss, which flows out of the lake and through the town. This river is one of four—the Rhine, Rhone, Reuss, and Ticino, which all rise near together in the neighbourhood of the St. Gothard; and yet, while one flows into the German ocean, another falls into the Mediterranean, both between them having first made nearly the compass of Switzerland.
The walking tourist comes often upon the rapid Reuss as it staggers and tumbles among the Swiss mountains. To me it had a special interest, for I once ascended the Galenhorn over the glaciers it starts from, and with only a useless guide, who lost his head and then lost his way, and then lost his temper and began to cry. We groped about in a fog until snow began to fall, and the snowstorm lasted for six hours—a weary time spent by us wandering in the dark and without food. At length we were discovered by some people sent out with lights to search for the benighted pleasure-seeker.
The Reuss has many cascades and torrent gorges as it runs among the rough crags, and it falls nearly 6,000 feet before it reaches the Lake of Lucerne, this lake itself being still 1,400 feet above the sea.
A gradual current towards the end of the lake entices you under the bridge where the river starts again on its course, at first gently enough, and as if it never could get fierce and hoarse-voiced when it has taken you miles away into the woods and can deal with you all alone.
The map showed the Reuss flowing into the Aar, but I could learn nothing more about either of these rivers, except that an intelligent man said, "The Reuss is a mere torrent," while another recounted how a man some years ago went on the Aar in a boat, and was taken up by the police and punished for thus perilling his life.