I am not very fresh in my
geology; but it is my impression that Switzerland was created especially
for the English, about the year of the Magna Charta, or a little later.
The Germans who come here, and who don't care very much what they eat,
or how they sleep, provided they do not have any fresh air in diningroom
or bedroom, and provided, also, that the bread is a little sour, growl
a good deal about the English, and declare that they have spoiled
Switzerland. The natives, too, who live off the English, seem to
thoroughly hate them; so that one is often compelled, in self-defense,
to proclaim his nationality, which is like running from Scylla upon
Charybdis; for, while the American is more popular, it is believed that
there is no bottom to his pocket.

There was a sprig of the Church of England on the steamboat on Lake
Leman, who spread himself upon a center bench, and discoursed very
instructively to his friends,--a stout, fat-faced young man in a white
cravat, whose voice was at once loud and melodious, and whom our
manly Oxford student set down as a man who had just rubbed through the
university, and got into a scanty living.

"I met an American on the boat yesterday," the oracle was saying to his
friends, "who was really quite a pleasant fellow. He--ah really was, you
know, quite a sensible man. I asked him if they had anything like this
in America; and he was obliged to say that they had n't anything like
it in his country; they really had n't. He was really quite a sensible
fellow; said he was over here to do the European tour, as he called it."

Small, sympathetic laugh from the attentive, wiry, red-faced woman on
the oracle's left, and also a chuckle, at the expense of the American,
from the thin Englishman on his right, who wore a large white waistcoat,
a blue veil on his hat, and a face as red as a live coal.

"Quite an admission, was n't it, from an American? But I think they have
changed since the wah, you know."

At the next landing, the smooth and beaming churchman was left by
his friends; and he soon retired to the cabin, where I saw him
self-sacrificingly denying himself the views on deck, and consoling
himself with a substantial lunch and a bottle of English ale.

There is one thing to be said about the English abroad: the variety
is almost infinite. The best acquaintances one makes will be
English,--people with no nonsense and strong individuality; and one gets
no end of entertainment from the ot