The Spell of Switzerland

I must confess, I did not approve of my niece and her husband’s plan of expatriating themselves for the sake of giving their only son and heir, and their twin girls, a correct a...

It was inevitable. I, who had always jestingly compared myself to a brachypod, fastened by Fate to my native reef, and getting contact with visitors from abroad only as they wer...

Ruth and her husband were waiting for me. Will took charge of my luggage. He sent my trunk by express to Lausanne. He even insisted on paying the duties on my cigars--several bo...

The house stands by itself in a commanding situation on the Avenue de Collanges. It is of dark stone, with bay windows. The front door seemed to me, architecturally, unusually w...

The next day it rained. The whole valley was filled with mist. The _sudois_, as they call the southwest wind, moaned about the windows. But I did not care; explorations or excur...

It was a cozy and restful day and pleasant indoors, sheltered from the driving rain. I had a fine romp with the children in the nursery. I was delighted to find that the oldest,...

Chillon is probably the best-known castle in Switzerland. It commands the one pass between the mountains and the lake, and there, in the old days, two horsemen could defend the...

Lord Byron, in 1816, landed on this very spot with his friend John Cam Hobhouse. They came over from Clarens, probably in a _naue_, whose name, as well as its shape, harked back...

Years ago I used to know the Princess Kóltsova-Masálskaya, who under the name of Dora d’Istria wrote many stories and semi-historical works. She was a most cultivated and fascin...

We spent so much time at Chillon that we decided to put in for the night at Evian; but first we circled round the Ilot de Peilz (or, as some call it, L’Ile de Paix), one of the...

By a strange coincidence I found in the room where I slept that night a tattered copy of “Anne of Geierstein,” and almost the first thing I turned to the description of an Alpin...

Shortly after we reached the Grand Hôtel des Bergues, which is so beautifully situated on the quai of the same name, it began to rain. My room looked down on the Ile Rousseau wi...

The weather showed unusual good humour by clearing in the night. Geneva woke up to bright sparkling sunshine. I went out before breakfast, indeed before sunrise, on the bridge,...

Apparently Geneva is prouder of being the Mother of Rousseau than of having adopted Calvin. Both were exiled--Calvin by his enemies; Rousseau by his worst enemy, himself. Calvin...

Immediately after luncheon we reembarked in the swift _Hirondelle_, which was impatiently waiting for us, and started Lausanneward. As in our trip down, we hugged the shore. Hig...

I can see the importance of a knowledge of geology as a basis for the study of history. How do valleys run--north and south or east and west? This inclination conditions sunligh...

A small boulder rolling down into a river may quite change its course. The sand begins immediately to bank up against it; the current is insensibly turned away toward the other...

While I was reading about Madame de Genlis after breakfast one morning, Ruth came into the library and we talked about the advantage of foreign travel. Does the broadening effec...

Whom should we meet at the hotel at Sion but my friend, Lady Q. She immediately recognized me, and I had the pleasure of presenting to her my niece and her husband. She was on h...

We saw everything that there was to see at Zermatt--the relics of the early climbers in the little museum; the pathetic graveyard where the victims of their mad ambition are com...

A few days later Will and I got to talking about the ancient passages of the Alps. Hannibal’s was the first. We got out a copy of Polybius and read the simple narrative of that...

One morning Ruth brought me my mail. Among the letters was one with the postmark Zürich. The superscription was written in a very individual hand, every letter carefully formed....

Early the following morning I started for Zürich by the way of Lucerne. I shall say nothing about that gem of cities now; for, in the first place, it was raining when I arrived...

My classmate, Ned Allen, was always a dilettante; if he had been obliged to work, he might have accomplished great things; but, though he may have had ambitions, the days of his...

In going back I walked part of the way, taking in inverse order Byron’s route, which is interesting because he worked his reminiscences of it into “Manfred.” This is what Byron...