and seek," or, in my Western vernacular, "High spy." This boy was the "blinder." I learned from the Doctor that, in his boyhood in Scotland, the impressive formula of "Iry, ury, ickery, ann," etc., was used in counting out the first "blinder," exactly as in the United States. Men and nations may differ, but boys are the same in every country and every age. I have no doubt that Jacob and Esau played "mumble-peg" according to the rules governing the game in our time.

Berne has a famous clock. In the fullness of time a man hits a bell with a hammer, a procession of bears march out and back again, a cock crows twice, and a rummy-looking old king nods his head, opens his mouth, and moves his scepter with each stroke of the hour. Occasionally the king fails to perform his functions, the bears do not appear, or the cock is out of order; but on the occasion of our visit, man, bears, king and cock all went off with charming regularity.

I think the original location of the story of "Go it husband, go it bear," must have been Berne, for the town is not only full of bears of wood, stone and metal, but several live bears have been kept for ages in a pit for the benefit of the corporation. To go to Berne and not see the bears would be unpardonable. The bears were not as savage as I could have wished, and seemed satisfied to eat carrots-though the inhabitants informed me, with great pride and pleasure, that the bears had once eaten an Englishman who had tumbled into the den.

Berne derives its principal distinction from its bears and from its being the capital of the Swiss Confederation. We visited the "Capitol." The "Senate" and "House" were very neat, handsome rooms, though I saw there no such portraits as those which

adorn the legislative halls of Kansas; in fact, I may say that I have never seen pictures like those anywhere else!

The country between Berne and Freiburg is not very interesting, as seen from the car windows. We stopped at Freiburg not to see, but to hear its famous organ, which had been warmly commended to us by Mr. Knox, whom I have mentioned in a previous letter. Freiburg (this is only one way of spelling it) is a very high, dry, rocky old place, inhabited by stolid, hard-working people, who wear wooden shoes, and do not seem to be happy. There is, in a rocky little plaza, a lime tree, which commemorates the battle of Morat, in which the Freiburgers assisted the other Swiss in routing and butchering the powerful army of Charles the Bold. Morat is miles away, but a Freiburg boy ran all the way to his town with a lime-tree branch in his hand as a symbol of triumph, uttered the word "Victory," and fell dead in his tracks. The lime branch was planted, and is now a wide-spreading tree, with a great trunk. There are wooden seats around the tree, and the limbs are held up by timbers. On the benches sat sundry wooden-shoed Freiburgers, smoking long pipes, while a sort of fair went on around about, the principal objects of traffic being red handkerchiefs and old scrap-iron. As the hour for the organplaying had not arrived, we spent some time, after the lime tree was disposed of, looking at the carved work about the main entrance of the church of St. Nicholas. In connection with the church of "Santa Claus," the patron of children, one had a right to expect something benevolent in the way of sculpture, but "on the contrary quite the reverse," the ornamentation was decidedly fiendish. An angel was depicted weighing a lot of the good and bad with a pair of old-fashioned balances; the wicked, of course,

G

"kicked the beam," in spite of a devil who was trying to pull them down. On the other side, a devil, every line of his countenance marked by business energy, was carrying off a quantity of children in a basket to a boiling cauldron, while another devil was blowing the fire under this kettle with a hand-bellows.

Two score people had gathered in the church, when the ringing of a bell announced that the organist had taken his place. Outside was hot, toiling, dirty, commonplace, ugly Freiburg; within was dimness and coolness and stillness, until the music broke the silence and woke the echoes of the vaulted arches. With the first note, the outer world, so drear and hard, seemed far away, and we were in the green valley amid the everlasting mountains. It was sunshine and song for awhile, and we heard, near or far, full or faint, the notes of the Alpine horn. Then the thunder muttered in the distance; then the pine-tops shivered and sighed; then a mysterious wind seemed to sweep through the space above our heads, and there was the sound of falling rain. Anon came the storm in all its fury, and the organ crashed and roared till women turned pale; and then, most wonderful of all, one heard above the fury of the storm, voices like the voices of human beings lost-calling, calling, calling in notes of entreaty and despair. No other instrument made by man have ever I heard, that had such a human voice as the great organ at Freiburg. This wonderful performance lasted an hour, and closed with a clangor as of the shutting of silver doors upon music that had come once and would never come again.

Everything had a new light after we left the church, and we were miles away before we ceased to hear in our "mind's ear" (for I suppose the mind has an ear as well as an "eye") the

music of the organ. It was a preparation for the beauteous sight when Lake Leman, shining in the sun, burst upon our vision, skirted by the vine-clad slopes. We passed by Vevay, and that reminded me how we read in our geographies that Switzers established a town of Vevay in the United States, and entered upon the cultivation of the vine; but the geographers did not tell how they succeeded, and it is a long time since I have heard of them. Now that I have reached Lake Leman, I might as well imitate the laudable example of Captain Scott's coon and " down." The country is as well known to everybody in the United States as "Down the Santa Fé road" is to the readers of Topeka newspapers. From Byron, with his “Prisoner of Chillon," down to Joaquin Miller, every traveling poet has had his say about Lake Leman and its shores. Lausanne and Geneva sound to everybody like Mark Twain's "Lancaster" and "Centerville," in the Holy Land.

come

There is such a thing as the "cream" of a journey, and it does not take long to skim it off. This process was performed, as far as Switzerland was concerned, by the time we reached Geneva. We went to Chamouni, of course, and we looked attentively at Mont Blanc, but it did not impress me as did a hundred other views in Switzerland. I believe I would rather see Pike's Peak. The ride from Geneva to Chamouni, by diligence, was rather interesting, for one of our fellow-travelers was an American lawyer who had traveled before; knew French and German; acted as interpreter for all hands, and was a capital talker on any and every subject. It did me good to feel that my fellow-citizen was the brightest man in the diligence.

A few hours sufficed for Chamouni and Mont Blanc. I will

return to Chamouni when the present village has been justly destroyed by an avalanche for extortion, and will ascend Mont Blanc when it can be done by railway.

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These last words may seem to indicate that some feeling of regret followed the little journey I made in Switzerland, but this is not true. On the contrary, it left bright memories, which will brighten, as do apples, when come the colder days. Should I live to be very old-which heaven forbid—when the sun above is no longer bright and warm; when the few faces of the dear ones left shall be dim; when I shall forget the things of yesterday, even names that I have repeated a thousand times; even in that last scene, when the poor old faded curtain is about to fall, I believe that I shall live over again the days of my pilgrimage— young days, bright days, "Swiss Days."