s to the grave; while the
nervously excited ones herd together by dozens, suggesting daily new
extravagances and caprices for the adoption of one another, till there
is not an air-drawn dagger of the mind unfamiliar to one among them; and
in this race of exaggerated sensibility they not uncommonly tumble over
the narrow boundary that separates eccentricity from something worse.

This massing together of such people in hundreds must be ruinous to
many, and few can resist the depressing influence which streets full of
pale faces suggest, or be proof against the melancholy derivable from
a whole promenade of cripples. There is something indescribably sad
in these rendezvous of ailing people from all parts of Europe--north,
south, east, and west; the snows of Norway and the suns of Italy;
the mountains of Scotland and the steppes of Russia; comparing their
symptoms and chronicling their sufferings; watching with the egotism of
sickness the pallor on their neighbour's cheek, and calculating their
own chances of recovery by the progress of some other invalid.

But were this all, the aspect might suggest gloomy thoughts, but could
not excite indignant ones. Unhappily, however, there is a reverse to the
medal. 'The pleasant and cheerful society,' so confidently spoken of by
your doctor has another representation than in the faces of sick people.
These watering-places are the depots of continental vice, the licensed
bazaars of foreign iniquity, the sanctuary of the outlaw, the home of
the swindler, the last resource of the ruined debauchee, the one spot
of earth beneath the feet of the banished defaulter. They are the
parliaments of European blackguardism, to which Paris contributes her
_escrocs_, England her 'legs' from Newmarket and Doncaster, and Poland
her refugee counts--victims of Russian cruelty and barbarity.

To begin--and to understand the matter properly, you must begin by
forgetting all you have been so studiously storing up as fact from the
books of Head, Granville, and others, and merely regard them as the
pleasant romances of gentlemen who like to indulge their own easy
humours in a vein of agreeable gossip, or the more profitable occupation
of collecting grand-ducal stars and snuff-boxes.

These delightful pictures of Brunnens, secluded in the recesses of wild
mountain districts inaccessible save to some adventurous traveller; the
peaceful simplicity of the rural life; the primitive habits of a happy
peasantry