interest in me which they do not really feel.
What do I care about the feelings of the
solid landlord and the sulky waiters? I
require the comforting outward show from
them—the inward substance is not of the
smallest consequence to me. When I travel
in civilised countries, I want such a reception
at my inn as shall genially amuse and gently
tickle all the region round about my organ of
self-esteem. Blunt honesty which is too
offensively truthful to pretend to be glad to
see me, shows no corresponding integrity—as
my own experience informs me at this very
hotel—about the capacities of its wine bottles,
but gives me a pint and charges me for a
quart in the bill, like the rest of the world.
Blunt honesty, although it is too brutally
sincere to look civilly distressed and
sympathetic when I say that I am tired after my
journey, does not hesitate to warm up, and
present before me as newly-dressed, a
Methuselah of a duck that has been cooked several
times over, several days ago, and paid for,
though not eaten, by my travelling predecessors.
Blunt honesty fleeces me according to
every established predatory law of the landlord's
code, yet shrinks from the amiable
duplicity of fawning affectionately before me
all the way up stairs when I first present,
myseIf to be swindled. Away with such
detestable sincerity as this! Away with the
honesty which brutalises a landlord's manners
without reforming his bottles or his bills!
Away with my German-Swiss hotel, and the
extortionate cynic who keeps it! Let others
pay tribute if they will to that boor in inn-
keeper's clothing, the colour of my money he
shall never see again.

Suppose I avoid German-Switzerland, and
try Switzerland Proper? Mirror! how did
I travel when I last found myself on the
Swiss side of the Alps?

The new vision removes me even from the
most distant view of an hotel of any kind,
and places me in a wild mountain country
where the end of a rough road is lost in the
dry bed of a torrent. I am seated in a queer
little box on wheels, called a Char, drawn by
a mule and a mare, and driven by a jovial
coachman in a blue blouse. I have hardly
time to look down alarmedly at the dry bed
of the torrent, before the Char plunges into
it. Rapidly and recklessly we thump along
over rocks and stones, acclivities and declivities
that would shake down the stoutest
English travelling-carriage, knock up the
best bred English horses, nonplus the most
knowing English coachman. Jovial Blue
Blouse, singing like a nightingale, drives
ahead regardless of every obstacle—the mule
and mare tear along madly as if the journey
was a great enjoyment of the day to them—
the Char cracks, rends, sways, bumps, and
totters but scorns, as becomes a hardy little mountain
vehicle, to overturn or come to pieces.
When we are not among the rocks we are
rolling and heaving in sloughs of black mud
and sand, like a Dutch herring-boat in a
ground-swell. It is all one to Blue Blouse
and the mule and mare. They are just as
ready to drag through sloughs as to jolt over
rocks; and when we do come occasionally to
a bit of unencumbered ground, they always
gallantly indemnify themselves for past hardship
and fatigue by galloping like mad. As
for my own sensations in the character of
passenger in the Char they are not, physically
speaking, of the pleasantest possible kind.
I can only keep myself inside my vehicle by
dint of holding tight with both hands by
anything I can find to grasp at; and I am so
shaken throughout my whole anatomy that
my very jaws clatter again, and my feet play
a perpetual tattoo on the bottom of the Char.
Did I hit on no method of travelling more
composed and deliberate than this, I wonder,
when I was last in Switzerland? Must I
make up my mind to be half-shaken to pieces
if I am bold enough to venture on going there
again?

The surface of the Black Mirror is once
more clouded over. It clears, and the vision
is now of a path along the side of a precipice.
A mule is following the path, and I am the
adventurous traveller who is astride on the
beast's back. The first observation that
occurs to me in my new position is, that
mules thoroughly deserve their reputation
for obstinacy, and that, in regard to the
particular animal on which I am riding, the less
I interfere with him and the more I conduct
myself as if I was a pack-saddle on his back,
the better we are sure to get on together.

Carrying pack-saddles is his main business
in life; and though he saw me get on his
back, he persists in treating me as if I was a
bale of goods, by walking on the extreme
edge of the precipice, so as not to run any
risk of rubbing his load against the safe, or
mountain, side of the path. In this and in
other things I find that he is the victim of
routine, and the slave of habit. He has a
way of stopping short, placing himself in a
slanting position, and falling into a profound
meditation at some of the most awkward
turns in the wild mountain-roads. I imagine
at first that he may be halting in this abrupt
and inconvenient manner to take breath;
but then he never exerts himself so as to tax
his lungs in the smallest degree, and he stops
on the most unreasonably irregular
principles, sometimes twice in ten minutes,—
sometimes not more than twice in two hours
—evidently just as his new ideas happen to
absorb his attention or not. It is part of Ida
aggravating character at these times, always
to become immersed in reflection where the
muleteer's staff has not room to reach him
with the smallest effect; and where, loading
him with blows being out of the question, loading
him with abusive language is the only other
available process for getting him on. I find
that he generally turns out to be susceptible
to the influence of injurious epithets after he