A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

when we reached there, huddled together about the scaffold

with their backs to the bitter wind. They had their red

guide-books open at the diagram of the view, and were

painfully picking out the several mountains and trying

to impress their names and positions on their memories.

It was one of the saddest sights I ever saw.

Two sides of this place were guarded by railings,

to keep people from being blown over the precipices.

The view, looking sheer down into the broad valley,

eastward, from this great elevation–almost a perpendicular

mile–was very quaint and curious. Counties, towns,

hilly ribs and ridges, wide stretches of green meadow,

great forest tracts, winding streams, a dozen blue lakes,

a block of busy steamboats–we saw all this little

world in unique circumstantiality of detail–saw it

just as the birds see it–and all reduced to the smallest

of scales and as sharply worked out and finished as a

steel engraving. The numerous toy villages, with tiny

spires projecting out of them, were just as the children

might have left them when done with play the day before;

the forest tracts were diminished to cushions of moss;

one or two big lakes were dwarfed to ponds, the smaller

ones to puddles–though they did not look like puddles,

but like blue eardrops which had fallen and lodged

in slight depressions, conformable to their shapes,

among the moss-beds and the smooth levels of dainty

green farm-land; the microscopic steamboats glided along,

as in a city reservoir, taking a mighty time to cover

the distance between ports which seemed only a yard apart;

and the isthmus which separated two lakes looked as if

one might stretch out on it and lie with both elbows

in the water, yet we knew invisible wagons were toiling

across it and finding the distance a tedious one.

This beautiful miniature world had exactly the appearance

of those “relief maps” which reproduce nature precisely,

with the heights and depressions and other details graduated

to a reduced scale, and with the rocks, trees, lakes,

etc., colored after nature.

I believed we could walk down to Wa”ggis or Vitznau

in a day, but I knew we could go down by rail in about

an hour, so I chose the latter method. I wanted to see

what it was like, anyway. The train came along about

the middle of the afternoon, and an odd thing it was.

The locomotive-boiler stood on end, and it and the whole

locomotive-boiler stood on end, and it and the whole

locomotive were tiled sharply backward. There were

two passenger-cars, roofed, but wide open all around.

These cars were not tilted back, but the seats were;

this enables the passenger to sit level while going down a

steep incline.

There are three railway-tracks; the central one is cogged;

the “lantern wheel” of the engine grips its way along

these cogs, and pulls the train up the hill or retards its

motion on the down trip. About the same speed–three miles

an hour–is maintained both ways. Whether going up or down,

the locomotive is always at the lower end of the train.

It pushes in the one case, braces back in the other.

The passenger rides backward going up, and faces forward

going down.

We got front seats, and while the train moved along

about fifty yards on level ground, I was not the

least frightened; but now it started abruptly downstairs,

and I caught my breath. And I, like my neighbors,

unconsciously held back all I could, and threw my weight

to the rear, but, of course, that did no particular good.

I had slidden down the balusters when I was a boy,

and thought nothing of it, but to slide down the balusters

in a railway-train is a thing to make one’s flesh creep.

Sometimes we had as much as ten yards of almost level

ground, and this gave us a few full breaths in comfort;

but straightway we would turn a corner and see a long steep

line of rails stretching down below us, and the comfort

was at an end. One expected to see the locomotive pause,

or slack up a little, and approach this plunge cautiously,

but it did nothing of the kind; it went calmly on, and went