in front of his house were bending beneath it;
spoke of a field of wheat sloping down to the side window of his
dining-room as already cut and carried; and said that the roses, which
the hurricane of rain had swept away, were come back lovelier and in
greater numbers than ever.

Of the ordinary Swiss people he formed from the first a high opinion
which everything during his stay among them confirmed. He thought it the
greatest injustice to call them "the Americans of the Continent." In his
first letters he said of the peasantry all about Lausanne that they were
as pleasant a people as need be. He never passed, on any of the roads,
man, woman, or child, without a salutation; and anything churlish or
disagreeable he never noticed in them. "They have not," he continued,
"the sweetness and grace of the Italians, or the agreeable manners of
the better specimens of French peasantry, but they are admirably
educated (the schools of this canton are extraordinarily good, in every
little village), and always prepared to give a civil and pleasant
answer. There is no greater mistake. I was talking to my landlord[118]
about it the other day, and he said he could not conceive how it had
ever arisen, but that when he returned from his eighteen years' service
in the English navy he shunned the people, and had no interest in them
until they gradually forced their real character upon his observation.
We have a cook and a coachman here, taken at hazard from the people of
the town; and I never saw more obliging servants, or people who did
their work so truly _with a will_. And in point of cleanliness, order,
and punctuality to the moment, they are unrivalled. . . ."

The first great gathering of the Swiss peasantry which he saw was in the
third week after his arrival, when a country fete was held at a place
called The Signal; a deep green wood, on the sides and summit of a very
high hill overlooking the town and all the country round; and he gave me
very pleasant account of it. "There were various booths for eating and
drinking, and the selling of trinkets and sweetmeats; and in one place
there was a great circle cleared, in which the common people waltzed and
polka'd, without cessation, to the music of a band. There was a great
roundabout for children (oh my stars what a family were proprietors of
it! A sunburnt father and mother, a humpbacked boy, a great poodle-dog
possessed of all sorts of accomplishments, and a young murderer of
seve