A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

crossed behind, gazing up with serious and innocent

admiration at the dozing tourists baking there in the sun.

Several small girls held night-capped babies nearly

as big as themselves in their arms, and even these fat

babies seemed to take a sort of sluggish interest in us.

We had slept an hour and a half and missed all the scenery!

I did not need anybody to tell me that. If I had been

a girl, I could have cursed for vexation. As it was,

I woke up the agent and gave him a piece of my mind.

Instead of being humiliated, he only upbraided me for being

so wanting in vigilance. He said he had expected to improve

his mind by coming to Europe, but a man might travel to the

ends of the earth with me and never see anything, for I

was manifestly endowed with the very genius of ill luck.

He even tried to get up some emotion about that poor courier,

who never got a chance to see anything, on account of

my heedlessness. But when I thought I had borne about

enough of this kind of talk, I threatened to make Harris

tramp back to the summit and make a report on that scenery,

and this suggestion spiked his battery.

We drove sullenly through Brienz, dead to the seductions

of its bewildering array of Swiss carvings and the

clamorous HOO-hooing of its cuckoo clocks, and had not

entirely recovered our spirits when we rattled across

a bridge over the rushing blue river and entered the

pretty town of Interlaken. It was just about sunset,

and we had made the trip from Lucerne in ten hours.

CHAPTER XXXII

[The Jungfrau, the Bride, and the Piano]

We located ourselves at the Jungfrau Hotel, one of those

huge establishments which the needs of modern travel

have created in every attractive spot on the continent.

There was a great gathering at dinner, and, as usual,

one heard all sorts of languages.

The table d’ho^te was served by waitresses dressed

in the quaint and comely costume of the Swiss peasants.

This consists of a simple gros de laine, trimmed with ashes

of roses, with overskirt of scare bleu ventre saint gris,

cut bias on the off-side, with facings of petit polonaise

and narrow insertions of pa^te de foie gras backstitched

to the mise en sce`ne in the form of a jeu d’esprit. It gives

to the wearer a singularly piquant and alluring aspect.

One of these waitresses, a woman of forty,

had side-whiskers reaching half-way down her jaws.

They were two fingers broad, dark in color, pretty thick,

and the hairs were an inch long. One sees many women on

the continent with quite conspicuous mustaches, but this

was the only woman I saw who had reached the dignity of whiskers.

After dinner the guests of both sexes distributed themselves

about the front porches and the ornamental grounds belonging

to the hotel, to enjoy the cool air; but, as the twilight

deepened toward darkness, they gathered themselves together

in that saddest and solemnest and most constrained of

all places, the great blank drawing-room which is the chief

feature of all continental summer hotels. There they

grouped themselves about, in couples and threes, and mumbled

in bated voices, and looked timid and homeless and forlorn.

There was a small piano in this room, a clattery, wheezy,

asthmatic thing, certainly the very worst miscarriage

in the way of a piano that the world has seen. In turn,

five or six dejected and homesick ladies approached

it doubtingly, gave it a single inquiring thump, and retired

with the lockjaw. But the boss of that instrument was

to come, nevertheless; and from my own country–from Arkansaw.

She was a brand-new bride, innocent, girlish, happy in herself

and her grave and worshiping stripling of a husband; she was

about eighteen, just out of school, free from affections,

unconscious of that passionless multitude around her;

and the very first time she smote that old wreck one

recognized that it had met its destiny. Her stripling

brought an armful of aged sheet-music from their room–

for this bride went “heeled,” as you might say–and bent

himself lovingly over and got ready to turn the pages.