He didn’t notice Josiah’s hand no more than if it wuz moonshine. He looked at us with cold, onsmilin’, onseein’, mean, some like them same moonbeams fallin’ down on dark, troubled waters, and I hearn him mutter:
“I thought I had found her! Where is Lucia?” sez he.
The tears run down my face onbeknown to me, for oh the hunted, haunted look he wore! He wuz a portly, handsome man when we see him last, with red cheeks, iron-gray hair and whiskers and tall, erect figger. Now he had the look of a man who had kep’ stiddy company with Death, Disgrace, Agony and Fear––kep’ company with ’em so long that he wuz a stranger to anybody and everybody else.
He hurried away, sayin’ agin in them same heart-breakin’ axents: “Where is Lucia?”
Arvilly turned round and looked after him as he shambled off.
“Poor creeter!” sez she. Her keen eyes wuz full of tears, and I knowed she would never stir him up agin with the sharp harrer of her irony and sarcasm if she had ever so good a chance. Josiah took out his bandanna and blowed his nose hard. He’s tender-hearted. We knowed sunthin’ how he felt; wuzn’t we all, Dorothy, Miss Meechim, Arvilly, Robert Strong, Josiah and I always, always looking out for a dear little form that had been wrenched out of our arms and 312 hearts, not by death, no, by fur worse than death, by the two licensed Terrors whose black dretful shadders fall on every home in our land, dogs the steps of our best beloved ready to tear ’em away from Love and from Safety and Happiness.
From Paris we went to Berne. I hearn Josiah tellin’ Tommy: “It is called Burn, I spoze, because it got burnt down a number of times.”
But it hain’t so. It wuz named from Baren (bears), of which more anon. Robert Strong had been there, and he wanted Dorothy to see the scenery, which he said was sublime. Among the highest points of the Bernise Alps and the Jungfrau and the Matterhorn, which latter peak is from twelve to fourteen thousand feet high. Good land! What if I had to climb it! But I hadn’t, and took comfort in the thought. Deep, beautiful valleys are also in the Oberland, as the southern part of the Canton is called, the Plain of Interlaken being one of the most beautiful.
There are several railways that centre in Berne, and it stands at the crossroads to France and Germany. And though it is a Swiss city, it seemed much more like a German one, so Robert Strong said. The people, the signs, the streets, the hotels and all, he said, was far more like a German city than a Swiss one.
It is quite a handsome city of about fifty thousand inhabitants, with straight, wide streets and handsome houses, and one thing I liked first-rate, a little creek called the Gassel, has been made to run into the city, so little rivulets of water flow through some of the streets, and it supplies the fountains so they spray up in a noble way.