bout him the children of his imagination, and
then on the morrow as president of the diet guide the deliberations of
representatives of his canton of Uri? His three professions of public
man, innkeeper, and author, Zahn upholds with undiscriminating pride.

Ernst Zahn was born at Zurich in 1867 in the Cafe Litteraire, of which
his father was lessee, and among whose habitues Gottfried Keller was
reckoned. He took up the paternal business, beginning at the bottom of
the ladder as a waiter in Geneva, Genoa, and Hastings, and in 1883
joined his father, who had meanwhile taken a lease of the railroad
restaurant at Goeschenen. At the last stop before entrance into the
darkness of the Gotthard tunnel many a traveler to Italy has doubtless
been struck by the classic features and the proud bearing of the
restaurateur, without knowing that he saw before him the most widely
read story-writer in the German language. As to his private life Zahn
published a few years ago in the magazine _The Literary Echo_ a few
details from which we quote the following:

Little room with the writing table, the tall book-cases, the few
pictures on the wall, and the immovable, grand, curious mountain always
peering in at thy window--little room with the great hubbub all about
thee, of thee I am to speak, and of him who sits within thy coziness!
It is not difficult to speak of thee: thou art a home, peaceful and
lost to the world, although the life of the world surges around thee
like the sea around an island. Behind thou hast the rumble of carts
going hither and thither all summer long over three mountain passes,
and before, the daily rattle and roar of the great railway trains of
the Gotthard. And yet thou art peaceful and hast taught me that it is
better to dwell in thee than in the bustling world, and hast taught me
that I do not need many men to make me happy in thee.... From the
writing table there is every few minutes a call to the dining rooms
on the ground floor, where the author is metamorphosed into a
victualler. Many persons shake their heads at this transformation. To
me the profession of my father is an object of affection; I owe it an
assured livelihood. Who knows but that the author in me also owes it
much of the spontaneity and joy of working?

But a fertile source of the author's joy of working is situated in a
little dwelling of which I mean to speak last in this account of my
houses. It stands in the valley of Goeschenen, at the e