"Yes; it is unsurpassed in Switzerland, perhaps in Europe, for magnificence of scenery," replies Mary, in level voice.
I resolve to cut geographic information out of any further stories I tell Mary. Do they commit Baedeker to memory nowadays in the schools?
"Exactly," I manage to reply without betraying too much astonishment at this revelation of the American educational method.
"Well, along the shore of this unsurpassed lake at the town of Lucerne there is a broad promenade with trees and benches and electric lights. Behind it are the big hotels all in a curving row, and after dinner all the people come out and stroll about while the band plays. It is a fine sight."
Mary seemed to be getting a little less than interested. She squirmed into a new position on the rough rockwork and then, looking out over the little pond with its hawking dragons whizzing back and forth, she asked: "What about the May-flies, please?"
I really believe she knew all about the hotels and promenade and the band. What wonderful schools!
"I was coming—I have just come to them," I reply with dignity.
I am a professor and have a certain stock supply of dignity to draw on when necessary. It isn't often necessary with Mary.
"Well, as I came from the covered Mühlenbrücke and out on to the lake-shore promenade, I saw a little crowd of people gathered under and about a brilliant arclight hanging in an open place in front of the great Schweizerhof Hotel. The light seemed to me curiously hazy, and even before I got near the crowd I had made a guess at what was going on. My guess that it was a May-fly dance of death was quite right. Perhaps it would really be better to call it a 'dance of life,' for it really was sort of a great wedding dance. But it was a dance of death, too, for the dancers were falling dead or dying out of the dizzying whirly circles by thousands. How many hundreds or thousands or millions of May-flies there were in the dense circling cloud about the light, I have no idea. But the air for twenty feet every way from the light was full of them, and the ground for a circle of thirty or forty feet underneath was not merely covered with the delicate dead creatures, but was covered for from one to two inches deep!
"The crowd of promenaders looked on in gaping wonder. Not one seemed to know what kind of creature this was, nor of course anything about what was really going on; that this was all of the few hours of feverish life which these May-flies enjoyed in their winged state, and that they gave it all up to the business of mating and egg-laying; where they came from, how they had lived before, why they should be here to-night and no other in the whole year, all these things which it seems to me the onlookers ought to have wanted to know, nobody seemed to know, nor anybody seemed particularly to care to.