oudest of all in the night train, who begins his endless growl
after "a decent dinner" at Basle, and his endless contempt for "Swiss
stupidity" at Lucerne. We track him from hotel to hotel, we meet him at
station after station, we revel in the chase as coat after coat of the
outer man peels away and the inner Englishman stands more plainly
revealed. But it is in the hotels of the higher mountains that we first
catch the man himself.

There is a sort of snow-line of nations, and nothing amazes one more in
a run through the Alps than to see how true the various peoples among
their visitors are to their own specific level. As a rule the Frenchman
clings to the road through the passes, the American pauses at the end of
the mule-track, the German stops at the chalet in the pine-forest. It is
only at the Alpine _table d'hote_, with a proud consciousness of being
seven thousand feet above the sea-level, that one gets the Englishman
pure. It is a very odd sensation, in face of the huge mountain-chains,
and with the glacier only an hour's walk overhead, to find one's self
again in a little England, with the very hotel-keeper greeting one in
one's native tongue, and the guides exchanging English oaths over their
trinkgelt. Cooped up within four walls one gets a better notion of the
varieties, the lights and shadows, of home-life than one gets in Pall
Mall. The steady old Indian couple whose climb is so infinitely slow and
sure, the Oxford freshman who comes blooming up the hill-side to declare
Titiens beautiful and to gush over the essays of Frederick Robertson,
the steady man of business who does his Alps every summer, the jaded
London curate who lingers with a look of misery round the stove, the
British mother, silken, severe, implacable as below, the British maiden
sitting alone in the rock-clefts and reviewing the losses and gains of
the last season--all these are thrown together in an odd jumble of rank
and taste by the rain, fog, and snowdrift which form some two-thirds of
the pleasures of the Alps. But, odd as the jumble is, it illustrates in
a way that nothing else does some of the characteristics of the British
nation, and impresses on one in a way that one never forgets the real
native peculiarities of Englishmen.

In the first place, no scene so perfectly brings out the absolute
vacuity of the British mind when one can get it free from the
replenishing influences of the daily paper. Alpine talk is the lowest
variety o