XLVII
LUCERNE—GOOD SAMARITANS AND AN ENGLISHMAN—A LECTURE TOUR—OHIOAN HOSPITALITY—MR. AND MRS. McKINLEY
Our homeward journey was performed in a delicious, leisurely fashion. We had worked hard for three months, collecting material for our prospective books. Once and again, when we would fain have had heart and imagination free to take in, at their full value, associations connected with, and emotions excited by, this or that sacred spot—did we remind ourselves of the plaint of the poet, who could never give himself up to the enjoyment of nature, because he saw, stamped upon sea and sky, mountain and river, in huge capitals—“MATERIAL.” Neither of us meant to write up Egypt, Rome, Florence, Switzerland, and the British Isles. With very much the joyous sense of relief with which children scamper home, when school is out, we roamed and lingered to our hearts’ content for the ten weeks that were left of our vacation. We fell in with congenial travelling companions in Egypt, joining parties for the run through Greece and Lower Italy. In Florence, we were reunited to friends with whom we had crossed the ocean, and did not part from them until, in Lucerne, they were summoned to Paris, while we planned a stay of some days in romantic regions endeared to us by former experiences, when the “Boy” of Loitering in Pleasant Paths was too young to appreciate the grandeur of mountain passes, snow-capped heights, azure lakes, and historic cantons.
Anticipation received a cruel blow in the beautiful lakeside city in which we had passed the heart of a memorable summer, fifteen years before. My son was stricken down with appendicitis in Lucerne, and I knew not a human creature beside himself in all Switzerland! By rare good-fortune, I recalled the name of a physician with whom my husband had become acquainted in our former stay here, and sent for him at once. He had retired from the active duties of his profession, resigning his practice to his son, who was, I learned, at the head of the hospital in Lucerne.
To my infinite relief, he informed me that there would be no need of an operation unless more serious symptoms should intervene. I subjoin the addenda to the verdict for the benefit of those whom it may concern:
“You Americans are too fond of the knife! It is not always necessary to cut out an inflamed appendix. In my hospital we have had four hundred cases of appendicitis within the last ten years, and have operated just forty times! The patients recovered without the use of the knife.”
If I had ever leaned, never so slightly, to misanthropic judgment of my fellow-mortals, I must have been shamed out of them by the incidents of the next fortnight of cruel anxiety, and what would have been unutterable loneliness but for the exceeding and abounding charity of the strangers by whom I was surrounded.
“It is my opinion,” pronounced the patient, when, on Easter morning, his chamber was fragrant with flowers and brightened by cards and messages of cheer and sympathy—“my decided and well-grounded conviction—that this Canton is peopled by the posterity of the Good Samaritan. Even the innkeeper has taken a hand in the mission to the traveller on the Jericho Road!”
The last remark was drawn out by the opening of a great box of violets, richly purple, and so freshly gathered that the odor floated into the air, like clouds of incense, with the lifting of the cover.
And, as a sudden thought struck him: “Have the blasted Britishers spoken yet?”