f conversation, as the common run of Alpine writing is the
lowest form of literature. It is in fact simply drawing-room talk as
drawing-room talk would be if all news, all scandal, all family details
were suddenly cut off. In its way it throws a pleasant light on English
education and on the amount of information about other countries which
it is considered essential to an English gentleman to possess. The
guardsman swears that the Swiss are an uneducated nation, with a
charming unconsciousness that their school system is without a rival in
Europe; the young lady to one's right wonders why such nice people
should be republicans; the Cambridge man across the table exposes the
eccentricity of a friend who wished to know in what canton he was
travelling; the squire with the pink and white daughters is amazed at
the absence of police. In the very heart of the noblest home of liberty
which Europe has seen our astonishing nation lives and moves with as
contented and self-satisfied an ignorance of the laws, the history, the
character of the country or its people, as if Switzerland were
Timbuctoo. Still, even sublime ignorance such as this is better than to
listen to the young thing of thirty-five summers, with her drivel about
William Tell; and one has always the resource of conceiving a Swiss
party tramping about England with no other notion of Englishmen than
that they are extortionate hotel-keepers, or of the English Constitution
than that it is democratic and absurd, or of English history than that
Queen Eleanor sucked the poison from her husband's arm.

The real foe of life over an Alpine table is that weather-talk, raised
to its highest power, which forms nine-tenths of the conversation. The
beautiful weather one had on the Rigi, the execrable weather one had at
the Furca, the unsettled weather one had on the Lake of Thun; the
endless questions whether you have been here and whether you have been
there; the long catechism as to the insect-life and the tariff of the
various hotels; the statements as to the route by which they have come,
the equally gratuitous information as to the route by which they shall
go; the "oh, so beautiful" of the gusher in ringlets, the lawyer's
"decidedly sublime," the monotonous "grand, grand" of the man of
business; the constant asseveration of all as to every prospect which
they have visited that they never have seen such a beautiful view in
their life--form a cataract of boredom which pours