pires and peaceful
crosses with those warlike edifices; dazzling white villas, planted like
tents under curtains of verdure; tall houses with old red skylights on
the roofs--this is our first glimpse of the Catholic and warlike city of
Lucerne. We seem to be approaching some town of old feudal times that
has been left solitary and forgotten on the mountain side, outside of
the current of modern life.

But when we pass through the station we find ourselves suddenly
transported to the side of the lake, where whole flotillas of large and
small boats lie moored on the blue waters of a large harbor. And along
the banks of this wonderful lake is a whole town of hotels, gay with
many colored flags, their terraces and balconies rising tier above
tier, like the galleries of a grand theater whose scenery is the mighty
Alps....

In summer Lucerne is the Hyde Park of Switzerland. Its quays are
thronged by people of every nation. There you meet pale women from the
lands of snow, and dark women from the lands of the sun; tall, six-foot
English women, and lively, alert, trim Parisian women, with the light
and graceful carriage of a bird on the bough. At certain hours this
promenade on the quays is like a charity fair or a rustic ball--bright
colors and airy draperies everywhere.

Nowhere can the least calm and repose be found but in the old town.
There the gabled houses, with wooden galleries hanging over the waters
of the Reuss, make a charming ancient picture, like a bit of Venice set
down amid the verdant landscape of the valley.

I also discovered on the heights beyond the ramparts a pretty and
peaceful convent of Capuchins, the way to which winds among wild plants,
starry with flowers. It is delicious to go right away, far from the town
swarming and running over with Londoners, Germans, and Americans, and to
find yourself among fragrant hedges, peopled by warblers whom it has
not yet occurred to the hotel-keepers to teach to sing in English. This
sweet path leads without fatigue to the convent of the good fathers.

In a garden flooded with sunshine and balmy with the fragrance of
mignonette and vervain, where broad sunflowers erect their black
discs fringed with gold, two brothers with fan-shaped beards, their
brass-mounted spectacles astride on their flat noses, and arrayed in
green gardening aprons, are plying enormous watering-cans; while, in
the green and cool half-twilight under the shadowy trees, big, rubicund
brother