FullReads

When we started we were detained a moment by conjugal affection. A lady, who had already kept the boat waiting, stopped midway up the gang-plank to kiss her husband in parting, in spite of the captain’s loud cries of “Allez! Allez!” and the angry derision of the passengers. We were in fact all furious, and it was as much as a mule team with bells, drawing a wagon loaded with bags of flower, and a tree growing out of a tower beside the lake, could do to put me in good-humor. Yet I was not really in a hurry to have the voyage end; I was enjoying every moment of it, only, when your boat starts, you do not want to stop for a woman to kiss her husband.

Again we were passing the wild Savoyard shore, where the yellow tops of the poplars jutted up like spires from the road-sides, and on the hill-sides tracts of dark evergreens blotted their space out of the vaster expanses of autumn foliage; back of all rose gray cliffs and crags. Now and then we met a boat of our line; otherwise the blue stretch of the water was broken only by the lateen-sails of the black-hulked lake craft. At that season the delicate flame of the Virginia-creeper was a prominent tint on the walls all round the lake.

Lausanne, which made us think Gibbon, of course, was a stately stretch of architecture along her terraces; Vevay showed us her quaint market square, and her old church on its heights; then came Montreux with its many-hotelled slopes and levels, and chalets peeping from the brows of the mountains that crowd it upon the lake. All these places keep multitudes of swans, whose snow reddened in the sunset that stained the water more and more darkly crimson till we landed at Villeneuve.

VIII

When December came, and the vintage and elections were over, and the winter had come down into the valley to stay, Italy called to us more and more appealingly.

Yet it was not so easy to pull up and go. I liked the row-boat on the lake, though it was getting too cold and rough for that; I liked the way the railway guards called out “Verney-Montreux!” and “Territey-Chillon!” as they ran alongside the carriages at these stations; I liked the pastel portraits of mademoiselle’s grandmothers on the gray walls of our pretty chamber that overlooked the lake, and overheard the lightest lisp of that sometimes bellowing body of water; I liked the notion of the wild-ducks among the reeds by the Rhone, though I had no wish to kill them; I liked our little corner fireplace, where I covered a log of the grand bois every night in the coals, and found it a perfect line of bristling embers in the morning; I liked Poppi and the three generations of Boulettes; and, yes, I liked mademoiselle and all her boarders; and I hated to leave these friends. Mademoiselle made a grand Thanksgiving supper in honor of the American nation, for which we did our best to figure both at the table, where smoked a turkey driven over the Alps from his Italian home for that fete (there are no Swiss turkeys), and in the dance, for which he had wellnigh disabled us. Poppi was in uncommon tune that night, and the voice of this pensive rheumatic lent a unique interest to every change of the Virginia reel.

But these pleasures had to end; it grew colder and colder; we had long since consumed all the old grape-roots which constituted our petit bois, and we were ravaging our way through an expensive pile of grand bois without much effect upon the climate. One morning the most enterprising spirit of our party kindled such a mighty blaze on our chamber hearth that she set the chimney on fire, thus threatening the Swiss republic with the loss of the insurance, and involving mademoiselle in I know not what penalties for having a chimney that could be set on fire. By the blessing of Heaven, the vigor of mademoiselle, and the activity of Louis and Alexis the farmer, the flames were subdued and the house saved. Mademoiselle forgave us, but we knew it was time to go, and the next Sunday we were in Florence.