The same strenuous method of preparatory training for the Titlis climb took me up to Mount Pilatus on the next day. But I was not allowed to return on the same day on account of a fierce thunder-storm raging in the valley below, which I watched from the top of the Pilatus. The innkeeper congratulated me upon my rare luck, not only because I had a chance to see the beautiful sight of a thunder-storm as viewed from a point above the thundering clouds, but principally because this thunder-storm prevented me from running the serious risk of descending and rowing back to Lucerne on the same day. Commenting upon the overconfidence of youth, the innkeeper said that every person has a guardian angel, but people intoxicated by wine or by exuberance of youth have two, one on each side. That was his explanation for the alleged fact, he said, that young people and intoxicated people seldom meet with serious accidents in mountain climbing. Some Americans, he thought, should have several guardian angels. This sarcasm was aimed at me, and it did not miss its mark.
Nevertheless, when on my fifth day in Lucerne I started out very early for the Titlis, I adopted the same strenuous method: rowing to Stansstadt, walking to Engelberg, and climbing to the hospice where I arrived at 11 P. M. I reached at sunrise of the following morning the top of Titlis, and saw the glories of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden as my English friend had promised. But I reached it much exhausted, and if it had not been for the skilled assistance of my trusty Swiss guide, the last four lines of Longfellow’s “Excelsior” would have described my Titlis climb quite accurately. I quote the lines:
“There in the twilight cold and gray,
Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay,
And from the sky, serene and far,
A voice fell, like a falling star,
Excelsior!”
Returning from Titlis, I ran into my English friend, and he remarked that I looked a little overtrained. We dined together, and when I told him the story of my six days’ Alpine experience, he begged me to hustle off to Idvor and see my mother first, and then return if I cared to pursue my own methods of exploring the beauties of Switzerland. “If you continue pursuing these methods now, I am afraid that your mother will never see you again, because there are not enough guardian angels in all the heavens to prevent you from breaking your neck.” I agreed, but assured him that my overstrenuous method of climbing Titlis was worth the risk; it had humbled my vanity and false pride, and made me more respectful to some of the slow ways of old Europe. It convinced me that even after serving my apprenticeship as greenhorn in the United States, I could still be a most verdant greenhorn in Europe. The railroad journey from Lucerne to Vienna afforded me much leisure time for philosophic reflections upon this matter. Thanks to Niven in Cambridge and to my English friend in Lucerne, I reached Vienna with a mental attitude considerably different from and certainly much less exalted than that which I had taken along when I sailed from New York four weeks before.
The railroad-station at Vienna where I took the train for Budapest looked quite familiar, although I had seen it but once before. I did not discover the great and mighty station-master who at my first appearance there, eleven years before, nearly sent me back to the prisons of the military frontier. The conductor, however, who called me “Gnaediger Herr” (gracious sir), when near Gaenserndorf he asked me for my first-class ticket, was the same man who, eleven years before, had called me a Serbian swineherd. I recognized him easily, although he looked very humble and had lost the fierceness which he had displayed when he roughly pulled me off my seat on that memorable first railroad journey from Budapest to Vienna. He failed to recall to memory the Serbian boy with yellow sheepskin coat and cap and the gaily colored bag. I gave him a generous tip as a reward for driving me into the arms of my good American friends who had seen me safely landed in Prague, and the memory of whose kind act had suggested my running off to the land of Lincoln.