lpine
scenery, and when the day was fair the sun came loafing up over the
eastern mountains about ten o'clock in the morning, and lounged down
behind the western tops about half-past three, after dinner. But then he
left the eternal snows of the Dent-du-Midi all flushed with his light,
and in the mean time he had glittered for five hours on the "_bleu
impossible_" of the Lake of Geneva, and had shown in a hundred changing
lights and shadows the storied and sentimentalized towers of the Castle
of Chillon. Solemn groups and ranks of Swiss and Savoyard Alps hemmed
the lake in as far as the eye could reach, and the lateen-sailed craft
lent it their picturesqueness, while the steamboats constantly making
its circuit and stopping at all the little towns on the shores imparted
a pleasant modern interest to the whole effect, which the trains of the
railroad running under the lee of the castle agreeably heightened.

II

The Swiss railroad was always an object of friendly amusement with the
children, who could not get used to having the trains started by a small
Christmas-horn. They had not entirely respected the English engine, with
the shrill falsetto of its whistle, after the burly roar of our
locomotives; and the boatswain's pipe of the French conductor had
considerably diminished the dignity of a sister republic in their minds;
but this Christmas-horn was too droll. That a grown man, much more
imposingly uniformed than an American general, should blow it to start a
real train of cars was the source of patriotic sarcasm whenever its
plaintive, reedy note was heard. We had come straight through from
London, taking the sleeping-car at Calais, and rolling and bounding over
the road towards Basle in a fashion that provoked scornful comparisons
with the Pullman that had carried us so smoothly from Boston to Buffalo.
It is well to be honest, even to our own adulation, and one must confess
that the sleeping-car of the European continent is but the nervous and
hysterical daughter of the American mother of sleeping-cars. Many
express trains are run without any sleeper, and the charges for berths
are ludicrously extravagant--five dollars apiece for a single night. It
is not strange that the native prefers to doze away the night
bolt-upright, or crouched into the corners of his repellently padded
carriage, rather than toss upon the expensive pallet of the
sleeping-car, which seems hung rather with a view to affording
involuntary exe