Loitering in Pleasant Paths

by Marion Harland

Altorf is a clean Swiss village where the window-curtains are all white, and most of the casements gay with flowers, and where the children, clean, too, but generally bare-legged and bare-headed, turn out in a body to gather around the strangers who stop to look at the monument. A very undignified memorial it is of the valiant Liberator. A big, burly plaster statue of the father, erected on the ground where Tell stood to shoot at the apple, brandishes the reserved arrow in the face of an imaginary bailiff. “With which I meant to kill you had I hurt my son!” says the inscription on the pedestal. The lime-tree to which the boy Albert was tied to be shot at was one hundred and forty-seven measured paces away. A fountain is there now, adorned by the statue of the magistrate who gave it to the town. Upon the sides of a tower that antedates Tell’s day, are faded frescoes, commemorating the apple-shot, his jump from the rocking boat and Gessler’s death. The Swiss are not enthusiastic idealists. They believe—very much—in a veritable Tell, preserve with jealous and reverential affection all traces of his existence and national services.

Our first ascent of the Rigi was made in company with two of our American “boys,” college-mates who had “run over” to pass a three months’ vacation upon “the other side.” Letters announcing this intention had been sent to us from home, and a later missive from London, containing a copy of their “itinerary,” repeated the invitation to join them at the steamboat landing in Lucerne, July 23d, 4.10 p.m. for a sail up the lake and a night on the Rigi.

“But how very-very extror’nary! Quite American in point of fact!” ejaculated an English lady, to whom I spoke at the lunch-table of our intended excursion. “When you have heard nothing from them in three weeks! They may have altered their plans entirely. You will not meet them, you may be sure.”

I smiled confidently. “The engagement is of six weeks’ standing. They will keep it, or we should have had a telegram.”

The steamboat touched at our side of the lake for passengers and I got on there, while Caput, who had an errand in the town, walked around by the iron bridge. I watched him cross it; noted what we had cause, afterward, to recollect,—the white radiations from the stone pavement that forms the flooring of the long causeway, and that the deck was hot to my feet.

“The intensest sun-blaze I have ever felt!” he said, coming aboard at the railway terminus. “Strangely sickening too! It made the brain reel!”

The train was puffing into the station. Among the earliest to step on the gangway were two bronzed youths on whose beards no foreign razor had fallen. Each carried a small satchel and had no other luggage or impedimenta incompatible with a quick “run.” New Yorkers going out to Newark or Trenton to pass the night with friends would have evinced as much sense of strangeness.

“We planned everything before sailing from home,” they said when we commended their punctuality “Lucerne and the Rigi were written down for to-day.”

They had never seen Lucerne before, but they had “studied it up” and were at home on the lake so soon as they got the points of the compass and we had swung loose from the pier. They would return with us to the town on the morrow and spend a day in seeing it. Including the Lion, of course, and the Glacial Garden and the old covered bridge with the queer paintings of the Dance of Death. And hear the grand organ in the Stifts-Kirche at vespers. The city-walls were better-preserved than they had imagined they would be. The nine watch-towers—where were they? They could count but six. They were on the lookout for the four arms that make the lake cruciform and traced them before we could designate them. Was that old tower in the rear of the handsome château over there the famous Castle of Hapsburg? Pilatus they recognized at a glance, and the different expression of his shore from the cheerful beauty of the Lucerne side, the pleasant town and the rising background of groves and fields, gardens and orchards. Vitznau? Were we there so soon? The sail had been to the full as charming as they had anticipated.

All this was, as the English lady had said, “quite American.” To us, used for many months to alternate douches of British nil admirai-ism and hot baths of Italian and French exaggeration of enthusiasm, the clear, methodical scheme of travel, the intelligent appreciation of all that met the eye, the frank, yet not effusive enjoyment of a holiday, well-earned and worthily-spent, were as refreshing as a dipper of cool water from the homestead spring would have been on that “blazing” day.