ere is an old town, gravely
picturesque and austerely fine in its fine old burgherly, Calvinistic,
exclusive way; and outside the walls there is a new town, very clean,
very cold, very quiet, with horse-cars like Boston, and a new
Renaissance theatre like Paris. The impression remains that Geneva is
outwardly a small moralized Bostonian Paris; and I suppose the reader
knows that it has had its political rings and bosses like New York. It
also has an exact reproduction of the Veronese tombs of the Scaligeri,
which the eccentric Duke of Brunswick, who died in Geneva, willed it the
money to build; like most fac-similes, they are easily distinguishable
from the original, and you must still go to Verona to see the tombs of
the Scaligeri. But they have the real Mont Blanc at Geneva, bleak to the
eye with enduring snow, and the Blue Rhone, rushing smooth and swift
under the overhanging balconies of quaint old houses. With its neat
quays, azure lake, symmetrical hotel fronts, and white steamboats,
Geneva was like an admirable illustration printed in colors, for a
holiday number, to imitate a water-color sketch.

When we started we were detained a moment by conjugal affection. A lady,
who had already kept the boat waiting, stopped midway up the gang-plank
to kiss her husband in parting, in spite of the captain's loud cries of
"Allez! Allez!" and the angry derision of the passengers. We were in
fact all furious, and it was as much as a mule team with bells, drawing
a wagon loaded with bags of flower, and a tree growing out of a tower
beside the lake, could do to put me in good-humor. Yet I was not really
in a hurry to have the voyage end; I was enjoying every moment of it,
only, when your boat starts, you do not want to stop for a woman to kiss
her husband.

Again we were passing the wild Savoyard shore, where the yellow tops of
the poplars jutted up like spires from the road-sides, and on the
hill-sides tracts of dark evergreens blotted their space out of the
vaster expanses of autumn foliage; back of all rose gray cliffs and
crags. Now and then we met a boat of our line; otherwise the blue
stretch of the water was broken only by the lateen-sails of the
black-hulked lake craft. At that season the delicate flame of the
Virginia-creeper was a prominent tint on the walls all round the lake.

Lausanne, which made us think Gibbon, of course, was a stately stretch
of architecture along her terraces; Vevay showed us her quaint market