rcise than promoting dear-bought slumber. One advantage
of it is that if you have to leave the car at five o'clock in the
morning, you are awake and eager to do so long before that time. At the
first Swiss station we quitted it to go to Berne, which was one of the
three points where I was told by the London railway people that my
baggage would be examined. I forget the second, but the third was Berne,
and now at Delemont I looked about for the customs officers with the
anxiety which the thought of them always awakens in the human heart,
whether one has meant to smuggle or not. Even the good conscience may
suffer from the upturning of a well-packed trunk. But nobody wanted to
examine our baggage at Delemont, or at the other now-forgotten station;
and at Berne, though I labored hard in several dialects with all the
railway officials, I could not get them to open one of our ten trunks or
five valises. I was so resolute in the matter that I had some difficulty
to keep from opening them myself and levying duty upon their contents.

III

It was the first but not the last disappointment we suffered in
Switzerland. A friend in London had congratulated us upon going to the
Vaud in the grape season. "For thruppence," he said, "they will let you
go into the vineyards and eat all the grapes you can hold." Arrived upon
the ground, we learned that it was six francs fine to touch a grape in
the vineyards; that every field had a watch set in it, who popped up
between the vines from time to time, and interrogated the vicinity with
an eye of sleepless vigilance; and that small boys of suspicious
character, whose pleasure or business took them through a vineyard, were
obliged to hold up their hands as they passed, like the victims of a Far
Western road agency. As the laws and usages governing the grape culture
run back to the time of the Romans, who brought the vine into the Vaud,
I was obliged to refer my friend's legend of cheapness and freedom to an
earlier period, whose customs we could not profit by. In point of fact,
I could buy more grapes for thruppence in London than in the Vaud; and
the best grapes we had in Switzerland were some brought from Italy, and
sold at a franc a pound in Montreux to the poor foreigners who had come
to feast upon the wealth of the local vineyards.

It was the rain that spoiled the grapes, they said at Montreux, and
wherever we complained; and indeed the vines were a dismal show of
sterility and bligh