seemed to
be thought a dainty beverage, but our scruples against it remained, and
I cannot say what its effect upon the drinkers might be. Perhaps it had
properties as a "sweet, oblivious antidote" which rendered necessary the
placard we saw in the cafe of the little Hotel Chillon:

"Die Rose blueht,
Der Dorn der sticht;
Wer gleich bezahlt
Vergisst es nicht."

Or, in inadequate English:

The roses bloom,
The thorns they stick;
No one forgets
Who settles quick.

The relation of the ideas is not very apparent, but the lyric cry is
distinctly audible.

II

One morning, a week before the vintage began, we were wakened by the
musical clash of cow-bells, and for days afterwards the herds came
streaming from the chalets on all the mountains round to feed upon the
lowland pastures for a brief season before the winter should house them.
There was something charming to ear and eye in this autumnal descent of
the kine, and we were sorry when it ended. They thronged the village in
their passage to the levels beside the Rhone, where afterwards they lent
their music and their picturesqueness to the meadows. With each herd
there were two or three goats, and these goats thought they were cows;
but, after all, the public interest of this descent of the cows was not
really comparable to that of the fall elections, now coming on with
handbills and newspaper appeals very like those of our own country at
like times. In the cafes, the steamboats, the railway stations, the
street corners, vivid posters warned the voters against the wiles of the
enemy, and the journals urged the people of the Canton Vaud to be up and
doing; they declared the issue before them a vital one, and the crisis a
crisis of the greatest moment.

[Illustration: _Castle of Aigle_]

In the mean time the people in our pension, who were so intelligent and
well informed about other things, bore witness to the real security of
the State, and the tranquillity of the Swiss mind generally concerning
politics, by their ignorance of the name of their existing President.
They believed he was a man of the name of Schultz; but it appeared that
his name was not at all Schultz, when we referred the matter to our
pasteur. It was from him, indeed, that I learned nearly all I knew of
Swiss politics, and it was from his teaching that I became a
conservative partisan in the question, then before the voters, of a
national free-schoo