as this. One of
them, as is known, died in Vevay by the shot of an assassin sent to
murder him by Charles II.; with another he is interred in the old Church
of St. Martin there; and I went there to revere the tombs of Ludlow and
Broughton. While I was looking about for them a familiar name on a
tablet caught my eye, and I read that "William Walter Phelps, of New
Jersey, and Charles A. Phelps, of Massachusetts, his descendants beyond
the seas," had set it there in memory of the brave John Phelps, who was
so anxious to be known as clerk of the court which tried Charles Stuart
that he set his name to every page of its record.

That tablet was the most interesting thing in the old church; but I
found Vevay quaint and attractive in every way. It is, as all the world
knows, the paradise of pensions and hotels and boarding-schools, and one
may live well and study deeply there for a very little money. It was
part of our mission to lunch at the most gorgeous of the hotels, and to
look upon such of our fellow-countrymen as we might see there, after our
long seclusion at Villeneuve; and we easily found all the splendor and
compatriotism we wanted. The hotel we chose stood close upon the lake,
with a superb view of the mountains, and its evergreens in tubs stood
about the gravelled spaces in a manner that consoled us with a sense of
being once more in the current of polite travel. The waiter wanted none
of our humble French, but replied to our timorous advances in that
tongue in a correct and finally expensive English. Under the stimulus of
this experience we went to a bric-a-brac shop and bought a lot of
fascinating old pewter platters and flagons, and then we went recklessly
shopping about in all directions. We even visited an exhibition of Swiss
paintings, which, from an ethical and political point of view, were
admirable; and we strolled delightedly about through the market, where
the peasant women sat and knitted before their baskets of butter, fruit,
cheese, flowers, and grapes, and warbled their gossip and their bargains
in their angelic Suissesse voices, while their husbands priced the
cattle and examined the horses. It was all very picturesque, and
prophesied of the greater picturesqueness of Italy, which we were soon
to see.

V

In fact, there was a great deal to make one think of Italy in that
region; but the resemblance ended mostly with the Southern architecture
and vegetation. Our lake coast had its own features