ere intended for show rather than service. Very few wore them:
sometimes they were tied up with umbrellas, but generally carried loose
in the hand or under the arm. The rich manufacturers of Trogen and
Herisau and Teufen had belts and silver-mounted dress-swords. With
scarce an exception, every man was habited in black, and wore a
stove-pipe hat, but the latter was in most cases brown and battered.
Both circumstances were thus explained to me: as the people vote with
the uplifted hand, the hat must be of a dark color, as a background, to
bring out the hands more distinctly; then, since rain would spoil a good
hat (and it rains much at this season), they generally take an old one.
I could now understand the advertisements of "secondhand cylinder hats
for sale," which I had noticed, the day before, in the newspapers of the
Canton. The slope of the hill was such that the hats of the lower ranks
concealed the faces of those immediately behind, and the assembly was
the darkest and densest I ever beheld. Here and there the top of a
scarlet waistcoat flashed out of the cloud with astonishing brilliancy.

With solemn music, and attended by the apparitors, in their two-colored
mantles, and the ancient pikemen, the few officials ascended the
platform. The chief of the two Landammaenner present took his station in
front, between the two-handed swords, and began to address the assembly.
Suddenly a dark cloud seemed to roll away from the faces of the people;
commencing in front of the platform, and spreading rapidly to the edges
of the compact throng, the hats disappeared, and the ten thousand faces,
in the full light of the sun, blended into a ruddy mass. But no; each
head retained its separate character, and the most surprising
circumstance of the scene was the distinctness with which each human
being held fast to his individuality in the multitude. Nature has drawn
no object with so firm a hand, nor painted it with such tenacious
clearness of color, as the face of man. The inverted crescent of sharp
light had a different curve on each individual brow before me; the
little illuminated dot on the end of the nose under it hinted at the
form of the nostrils in shadow. As the hats had before concealed the
faces, so now each face was relieved against the breast of the man
beyond, and in front of me were thousands of heads to be seen, touching
each other like so many ovals drawn on a dark plane.

The address was neither so brief nor so