A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

preserved in the family records.

An English gentleman who had lived some years in this region,

said it was the cradle of compulsory education.

But he said that the English idea that compulsory

education would reduce bastardy and intemperance was an

error–it has not that effect. He said there was more

seduction in the Protestant than in the Catholic cantons,

because the confessional protected the girls. I wonder

why it doesn’t protect married women in France and Spain?

This gentleman said that among the poorer peasants in the Valais,

it was common for the brothers in a family to cast lots

to determine which of them should have the coveted privilege

of marrying, and his brethren–doomed bachelors–heroically

banded themselves together to help support the new family.

We left Zermatt in a wagon–and in a rain-storm, too–

for St. Nicholas about ten o’clock one morning.

Again we passed between those grass-clad prodigious cliffs,

specked with wee dwellings peeping over at us from

velvety green walls ten and twelve hundred feet high.

It did not seem possible that the imaginary chamois

even could climb those precipices. Lovers on opposite

cliffs probably kiss through a spy-glass, and correspond

with a rifle.

In Switzerland the farmer’s plow is a wide shovel,

which scrapes up and turns over the thin earthy skin of his

native rock–and there the man of the plow is a hero.

Now here, by our St. Nicholas road, was a grave, and it

had a tragic story. A plowman was skinning his farm

one morning–not the steepest part of it, but still

a steep part–that is, he was not skinning the front

of his farm, but the roof of it, near the eaves–when he

absent-mindedly let go of the plow-handles to moisten

his hands, in the usual way; he lost his balance and fell

out of his farm backward; poor fellow, he never touched

anything till he struck bottom, fifteen hundred feet below.

[1] We throw a halo of heroism around the life of the

soldier and the sailor, because of the deadly dangers they

are facing all the time. But we are not used to looking

upon farming as a heroic occupation. This is because we

have not lived in Switzerland.

1. This was on a Sunday.–M.T.

From St. Nicholas we struck out for Visp–or Vispach–on foot.

The rain-storms had been at work during several days,

and had done a deal of damage in Switzerland and Savoy.

We came to one place where a stream had changed its

course and plunged down a mountain in a new place,

sweeping everything before it. Two poor but precious farms

by the roadside were ruined. One was washed clear away,

and the bed-rock exposed; the other was buried out of sight

under a tumbled chaos of rocks, gravel, mud, and rubbish.

The resistless might of water was well exemplified.

Some saplings which had stood in the way were bent to the ground,

stripped clean of their bark, and buried under rocky debris.

The road had been swept away, too.

In another place, where the road was high up on the mountain’s

face, and its outside edge protected by flimsy masonry,

we frequently came across spots where this masonry had

carved off and left dangerous gaps for mules to get over;

and with still more frequency we found the masonry

slightly crumbled, and marked by mule-hoofs, thus showing

that there had been danger of an accident to somebody.

When at last we came to a badly ruptured bit of masonry,

with hoof-prints evidencing a desperate struggle

to regain the lost foothold, I looked quite hopefully

over the dizzy precipice. But there was nobody down there.

They take exceedingly good care of their rivers in Switzerland

and other portions of Europe. They wall up both banks

with slanting solid stone masonry–so that from end

to end of these rivers the banks look like the wharves

at St. Louis and other towns on the Mississippi River.

It was during this walk from St. Nicholas, in the shadow

of the majestic Alps, that we came across some little

children amusing themselves in what seemed, at first,

a most odd and original way–but it wasn’t; it was in

simply a natural and characteristic way. They were roped