ll suffocated Tartarin,
agonized him, froze him, even more than the cold rain and the murky sky,
was the utter impossibility of talking. True, he had again met faces
that he knew--the member of the Jockey Club with his niece (h'm!
h'm!..), the academician Astier-Rehu, and the Bonn Professor
Schwanthaler, those two implacable enemies condemned to live side by
side for a month manacled to the itinerary of a Cook's Circular,
and others. But none of these illustrious Prunes would recognize the
Tarasconese Alpinist, although his mountain muffler, his metal utensils,
his ropes in saltire, distinguished him from others, and marked him in
a manner that was quite peculiar. They all seemed ashamed of the night
before, and the inexplicable impulse communicated to them by the fiery
ardour of that fat man.

Mme. Schwanthaler, alone, approached her partner, with the rosy,
laughing face of a plump little fairy, and taking her skirt in her two
fingers as if to suggest a minuet. "Ballir... dantsir... very choli..."
remarked the good lady. Was this a memory that she evoked, or a
temptation that she offered? At any rate, as she did not let go of him,
Tartarin, to escape her pertinacity, went up on deck, preferring to be
soaked to the skin rather than be made ridiculous.

And it rained!.. and the sky was dirty!.. To complete his gloom, a whole
squad of the Salvation Army, who had come aboard at Beckenried, a dozen
stout girls with stolid faces, in navy-blue gowns and Greenaway bonnets,
were grouped under three enormous scarlet umbrellas, and were singing
verses, accompanied on the accordion by a man, a sort of David-la-Gamme,
tall and fleshless with crazy eyes. These sharp, flat, discordant
voices, like the cry of gulls, rolled dragging, drawling through the
rain and the black smoke of the engine which the wind beat down upon the
deck. Never had Tartarin heard anything so lamentable.

At Bruennen the squad landed, leaving the pockets of the other travellers
swollen with pious little tracts; and almost immediately after the songs
and the accordion of these poor larvae ceased, the sky began to clear
and patches of blue were seen.

They now entered the lake of Uri, closed in and darkened by lofty,
untrodden mountains, and the tourists pointed out to each other, on
the right at the foot of the Seelisberg, the field of Gruetli, where
Melchtal, Fuerst, and Stauffacher made oath to deliver their country.

Tartarin, with much emotion, took of