so keep a large den of living bears at the expense of the
government. The bear is the heraldic emblem of Switzerland, as is our
eagle of American freedom.

Of the fictitous hero, William Tell, and the nature and character of the
Swiss Republic, I can not say more in the compass of this book, than that
the former is a myth and that the latter was in a great measure the
outgrowth of poverty.

The reader may form an idea of the miserable dwellings of the peasantry on
the mountains, when he is told that many are hardly distinguishable from
the stables in which the cattle are sheltered.

When I came into view of Guttannen, the first village of any considerable
extent that I passed after seeing the Rhone Glacier and the wildnesses of
the Grimsel and Haslithal, where no houses except hotels, and in some
places not even trees or grass abound, I felt glad once more to see a
group of human habitations, and determined to count them, so that I might
record their number. I passed along the edge of the mountains where I
could easily overlook the village, but it was in many instances impossible
to determine by a survey of their external appearances, which were the
stables and which the houses or huts, so I counted them all, large and
small, and found their number between 60 and 90. I once intended to count
these buildings only with windows, as houses; but I soon discovered that
some huts had windows only on one or several sides, and looked like
stables on the other sides!

A question to dairy men: Do thunder and lightning affect fresh milk? A
lady keeping a cafe in Brienz, told me that if a thunder storm overtook
those which were bringing the fresh milk from the mountains, the milk
would suddenly turn sour, so that it could no longer be boiled for
drinking it sweet. She said, "_Es thut sie verbolera, so das sie gerinnt
wen man sie kochen will!_"

Chapter XVI.

Geneva to Turin.

Switzerland has two national languages, the German and the French, both of
which are recognized by the Government. Geneva is French, so I had some
trouble in getting my information and procuring a ticket for Italy. I left
Geneva at 6:40 a.m., September 10th; and after passing through a number of
tunnels, one of which required 5-1/2 minutes of moderate railway speed, we
arrived at Bellegarde, on the French border, and passed muster. From 9:00
to 10:00 o'clock we were detained at Culoz, and by noon we saw the
snow-covered Alps again. At 3:30 p.m