stead of four, green shuttered casements instead of
sash windows, and great numbers of neatly dressed women in economical
mourning.

"Oh! there's a priest!" one said, and was betrayed into suchlike artless
cries.

It was a real other world, with different government and different
methods, and in the night one was roused from uneasy slumbers and
sat blinking and surly, wrapped up in one's couverture and with one's
oreiller all awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the German
official, so different in manner from the British; and when one woke
again after that one had come to Bale, and out one tumbled to get coffee
in Switzerland....

I have been over that route dozens of times since, but it still revives
a certain lingering youthfulness, a certain sense of cheerful release in
me.

I remember that I and Willersley became very sociological as we ran on
to Spiez, and made all sorts of generalisations from the steeply sloping
fields on the hillsides, and from the people we saw on platforms and
from little differences in the way things were done.

The clean prosperity of Bale and Switzerland, the big clean stations,
filled me with patriotic misgivings, as I thought of the vast dirtiness
of London, the mean dirtiness of Cambridgeshire. It came to me that
perhaps my scheme of international values was all wrong, that quite
stupendous possibilities and challenges for us and our empire might be
developing here--and I recalled Meredith's Skepsey in France with a new
understanding.

Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn Norfolk suit of greenish
grey tweeds that ended unfamiliarly at his rather impending, spectacled,
intellectual visage. I didn't, I remember, like the contrast of him with
the drilled Swiss and Germans about us. Convict coloured stockings
and vast hobnail boots finished him below, and all his luggage was a
borrowed rucksac that he had tied askew. He did not want to shave in
the train, but I made him at one of the Swiss stations--I dislike
these Oxford slovenlinesses--and then confound him! he cut himself and
bled....

Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating air that seemed to
have washed our very veins to an incredible cleanliness, and
eating hard-boiled eggs in a vast clear space of rime-edged rocks,
snow-mottled, above a blue-gashed glacier. All about us the monstrous
rock surfaces rose towards the shining peaks above, and there were
winding moraines from which the ice had receded