ligion influences local feeling, the
Protestant Church being divided into orthodox and liberal factions;
there is a large Unitarian party besides, and agnosticism is a
qualifying element of religious thought.

Outside of our pension I had not many sources of information concerning
the political or social life at Villeneuve. I knew the village
shoemaker, a German, who had fixed his dwelling there because it was so
_bequem_, and who had some vague aspirations towards Chicago, whither a
citizen of Villeneuve had lately gone. But he was discouraged by my
representation, with his wax, his awl, and his hammer, successively
arranged as New York, Cleveland, and Chicago, on his shoe-bench, of the
extreme distance of the last from the seaboard. He liked his neighbors
and their political system; and so did the _portier_ at the Hotel Byron,
another German, with whom I sometimes talked of general topics in
transacting small affairs of carriage hire and the like, and who invited
me to notice how perfectly well these singular Swiss, in the midst of a
Europe elsewhere overrun with royalties, got on without a king, queen,
or anything of the kind. In his country, he said, those hills would be
covered with fortifications, but here they seemed not to be thought
necessary.

[Illustration: _The Market at Vevey_]

I made friends with the _instituteur_ of the Villeneuve public school,
who led the singing at church, and kept the village book-store; and he
too talked politics with me, and told me that all elections were held on
Sunday, when the people were at leisure, for otherwise they would not
take the time to vote. He was not so clear as to why they were always
held in church, but that is the fact; and sometimes the sacred character
of the place is not enough to suppress boisterous party feeling, though
it certainly helps to control it.

After divine service on election Sunday I went to the Croix Blanche for
my coffee, to pass the time till the voting should begin. On the church
door was posted a printed summons to the electors, and on the cafe
billiard tables I found ballots of the different parties scattered.
Gendarmes had also distributed them about in the church pews; they were
enclosed in envelops, which were voted sealed. On a table before the
pulpit the ballot-box--a glass urn--was placed; and beside it sat the
judges of election, with lists of the registered voters. But in any
precinct of the canton an elector who could prove tha