A Little Swiss Sojourn | Page 2

if you have to leave the car at five o'clock in the
morning, you are awake and eager to do so long before that time. At the
first Swiss station we quitted it to go to Berne, which was one of the
three points where I was told by the London railway people that my
baggage would be examined. I forget the second, but the third was
Berne, and now at Delemont I looked about for the customs officers

with the anxiety which the thought of them always awakens in the
human heart, whether one has meant to smuggle or not. Even the good
conscience may suffer from the upturning of a well-packed trunk. But
nobody wanted to examine our baggage at Delemont, or at the other
now-forgotten station; and at Berne, though I labored hard in several
dialects with all the railway officials, I could not get them to open one
of our ten trunks or five valises. I was so resolute in the matter that I
had some difficulty to keep from opening them myself and levying
duty upon their contents.
III
It was the first but not the last disappointment we suffered in
Switzerland. A friend in London had congratulated us upon going to
the Vaud in the grape season. "For thruppence," he said, "they will let
you go into the vineyards and eat all the grapes you can hold." Arrived
upon the ground, we learned that it was six francs fine to touch a grape
in the vineyards; that every field had a watch set in it, who popped up
between the vines from time to time, and interrogated the vicinity with
an eye of sleepless vigilance; and that small boys of suspicious
character, whose pleasure or business took them through a vineyard,
were obliged to hold up their hands as they passed, like the victims of a
Far Western road agency. As the laws and usages governing the grape
culture run back to the time of the Romans, who brought the vine into
the Vaud, I was obliged to refer my friend's legend of cheapness and
freedom to an earlier period, whose customs we could not profit by. In
point of fact, I could buy more grapes for thruppence in London than in
the Vaud; and the best grapes we had in Switzerland were some
brought from Italy, and sold at a franc a pound in Montreux to the poor
foreigners who had come to feast upon the wealth of the local
vineyards.
It was the rain that spoiled the grapes, they said at Montreux, and
wherever we complained; and indeed the vines were a dismal show of
sterility and blight, even to the spectator who did not venture near
enough to subject himself to a fine of six francs. The foreigners had
protected themselves in large numbers by not coming, and the natives

who prosper upon them suffered. The stout lady who kept a small shop
of ivory carvings at Montreux continually lamented their absence to me:
"Die Fremden kommen nicht, dieses regenes Wetter! Man muss
Geduldt haben! Die Fremden kommen nicht!" She was from Interlaken,
and the accents of her native dialect were flavored with the strong
waters which she seemed always to have been drinking, and she put her
face close up to that of the good, all-sympathizing Amerikaner who
alone patronized her shop, and talked her sorrows loudly into him, so
that he should not misunderstand.
[Illustration: Entrance to Villeneuve]
IV
But one must not be altogether unreasonable. When we first came in
sight of the lake the rain lifted, and the afternoon sun gushed out upon a
world of vineyards. In other words, the vines clothe all the little levels
and vast slopes of the mountain-sides as far up as the cold will let the
grapes grow. There is literally almost no other cultivation, and it is a
very pretty sight. On top of the mountains are the chalets with their
kine, and at a certain elevation the milk and the wine meet, while below
is the water of the lake, so good to mix with both. I do not know that
the Swiss use it for that purpose, but there are countries where
something of the sort would be done.
When the train put us down at Villeneuve, among railway people as
indifferent as our own at country stations, and much crosser and more
snubbing, the demand for grapes began with the party who remained
with the baggage, while a party of the second part went off to find the
pension where we were to pass the next three months. The
grape-seekers strolled up the stony, steaming streets of the little town,
asking for grapes right and left, at all the shops, in their imperfect
French, and returned to the station