d hung before them during all our stay. Still we
were interested in the queer old city, with the second story of the
houses, through many of the streets, projecting over the sidewalk,
forming gloomy arcades, and bright red cushions in the window seats,
where pretty girls sat and sewed, and watched the passers down below. I
remember it rained, and there was a market held out in the square before
the hotel windows in the early morning, where the umbrellas made every
old woman to dwell in her own tent for the time. When it was over, and
the rain had ceased to fall, we waited in front of the old clock-tower
before driving out through the pleasant suburbs, with market women,
baskets on their arms, stray children, idle loungers, and alert
tourists, for the feeble puppet-show heralded by the asthmatic crow of a
rheumatic cock. Of course it was a procession of bears. Everything in
Berne is, or has to do with, a bear, since the city was founded upon the
spot where somebody killed a bear. Bears surmount most of the stone
fountains in the streets; they ornament the monuments erected to heroes.
Cut from wood, they are offered for sale as _souvenirs_; stuffed, they
are exhibited at the zoological gardens; and, to crown all, government
supports in luxury a whole family of bruins. We left the carriage upon
the Nydeck bridge, to look down into the immense circular basin where
they are kept. It must be a dull life, even for a bear. They are ugly
creatures, with reddish fur, and spend their time climbing a leafless
semblance of a tree, with no object but to descend again, or in sitting
up to beg for biscuits of visitors. So universal has the custom of
begging become in Switzerland, that even the bears take to it quite
naturally.

The mountains obstinately refusing to appear, we left Berne for Thun,
passing through a lovely country. Only occasionally did a road appear;
then it would seem to extend for long miles, bordered by immense,
close-planted trees. Neither fences nor hedges were there to divide the
fields; but patches of grain were thrown down anywhere and at any angle.
Potatoes were sown like grass instead of being planted in hills, and
were devoured this year by rot--the worst feature in the landscape. All
through the early summer we had seen hemp growing everywhere. Now it was
cut, and lying outspread upon the ground in odd regularity, an
occasional head only being left to run to seed.

There was nothing to visit in Thun. But th