A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

at ten at night–you generally do. The multitude

spend half an hour verifying their baggage and getting

it transferred to the omnibuses; but the courier puts

you into a vehicle without a moment’s loss of time,

and when you reach your hotel you find your rooms have been

secured two or three days in advance, everything is ready,

you can go at once to bed. Some of those other people will

have to drift around to two or three hotels, in the rain,

before they find accommodations.

I have not set down half of the virtues that are

vested in a good courier, but I think I have set down

a sufficiency of them to show that an irritable man

who can afford one and does not employ him is not a

wise economist. My courier was the worst one in Europe,

yet he was a good deal better than none at all.

It could not pay him to be a better one than he was,

because I could not afford to buy things through him.

He was a good enough courier for the small amount he

got out of his service. Yes, to travel with a courier

is bliss, to travel without one is the reverse.

I have had dealings with some very bad couriers; but I have also

had dealings with one who might fairly be called perfection.

He was a young Polander, named Joseph N. Verey. He spoke

eight languages, and seemed to be equally at home in all

of them; he was shrewd, prompt, posted, and punctual;

he was fertile in resources, and singularly gifted in

the matter of overcoming difficulties; he not only knew

how to do everything in his line, but he knew the best ways

and the quickest; he was handy with children and invalids;

all his employer needed to do was to take life easy

and leave everything to the courier. His address is,

care of Messrs. Gay & Son, Strand, London; he was formerly

a conductor of Gay’s tourist parties. Excellent couriers

are somewhat rare; if the reader is about to travel,

he will find it to his advantage to make a note of this one.

CHAPTER XXXIII

[We Climb Far–by Buggy]

The beautiful Giesbach Fall is near Interlaken, on the

other side of the lake of Brienz, and is illuminated

every night with those gorgeous theatrical fires whose

name I cannot call just at this moment. This was said

to be a spectacle which the tourist ought by no means

to miss. I was strongly tempted, but I could not go

there with propriety, because one goes in a boat.

The task which I had set myself was to walk over Europe

on foot, not skim over it in a boat. I had made a tacit

contract with myself; it was my duty to abide by it.

I was willing to make boat trips for pleasure, but I could

not conscientiously make them in the way of business.

It cost me something of a pang to lose that fine sight,

but I lived down the desire, a nd gained in my self-respect

through the triumph. I had a finer and a grander sight,

however, where I was. This was the mighty dome of the Jungfrau

softly outlined against the sky and faintly silvered by

the starlight. There was something subduing in the influence

of that silent and solemn and awful presence; one seemed

to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal,

face to face, and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature

of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast.

One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation

of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice–a spirit

which had looked down, through the slow drift of the ages,

upon a million vanished races of men, and judged them;

and would judge a million more–and still be there,

watching, unchanged and unchangeable, after all life

should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation.

While I was feeling these things, I was groping,

without knowing it, toward an understanding of what the

spell is which people find in the Alps, and in no other