A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

swearing like mad about something or other. We could not

find out what the matter was. He had asked the landlady

the altitude of her place above the level of the lake,

and she told him fourteen hundred and ninety-five feet.

That was all that was said; then he lost his temper.

He said that between ——fools and guide-books, a man

could acquire ignorance enough in twenty-four hours in a

country like this to last him a year. Harris believed

our boy had been loading him up with misinformation;

and this was probably the case, for his epithet described

that boy to a dot.

We got under way about the turn of noon, and pulled out

for the summit again, with a fresh and vigorous step.

When we had gone about two hundred yards, and stopped

to rest, I glanced to the left while I was lighting my pipe,

and in the distance detected a long worm of black smoke

crawling lazily up the steep mountain. Of course that was

the locomotive. We propped ourselves on our elbows at once,

to gaze, for we had never seen a mountain railway yet.

Presently we could make out the train. It seemed incredible

that that thing should creep straight up a sharp slant

like the roof of a house–but there it was, and it was doing

that very miracle.

In the course of a couple hours we reached a fine breezy

altitude where the little shepherd huts had big stones

all over their roofs to hold them down to the earth when

the great storms rage. The country was wild and rocky

about here, but there were plenty of trees, plenty of moss,

and grass.

Away off on the opposite shore of the lake we could

see some villages, and now for the first time we could

observe the real difference between their proportions

and those of the giant mountains at whose feet they slept.

When one is in one of those villages it seems spacious,

and its houses seem high and not out of proportion to the

mountain that overhands them–but from our altitude,

what a change! The mountains were bigger and grander

than ever, as they stood there thinking their solemn

thoughts with their heads in the drifting clouds,

but the villages at their feet–when the painstaking

eye could trace them up and find them–were so reduced,

almost invisible, and lay so flat against the ground,

that the exactest simile I can devise is to compare

them to ant-deposits of granulated dirt overshadowed

by the huge bulk of a cathedral. The steamboats skimming

along under the stupendous precipices were diminished

by distance to the daintiest little toys, the sailboats

and rowboats to shallops proper for fairies that keep

house in the cups of lilies and ride to court on the backs

of bumblebees.

Presently we came upon half a dozen sheep nibbling grass

in the spray of a stream of clear water that sprang

from a rock wall a hundred feet high, and all at once

our ears were startled with a melodious “Lul …

l … l l l llul-lul-LAhee-o-o-o!” pealing joyously

from a near but invisible source, and recognized that we

were hearing for the first time the famous Alpine JODEL

in its own native wilds. And we recognized, also,

that it was that sort of quaint commingling of baritone

and falsetto which at home we call “Tyrolese warbling.”

The jodeling (pronounced yOdling–emphasis on the O)

continued, and was very pleasant and inspiriting to hear.

Now the jodeler appeared–a shepherd boy of sixteen–

and in our gladness and gratitude we gave him a franc

to jodel some more. So he jodeled and we listened.

We moved on, presently, and he generously jodeled us

out of sight. After about fifteen minutes we came across

another shepherd boy who was jodeling, and gave him half

a franc to keep it up. He also jodeled us out of sight.

After that, we found a jodeler every ten minutes;

we gave the first one eight cents, the second one

six cents, the third one four, the fourth one a penny,

contributed nothing to Nos. 5, 6, and 7, and during

the remainder of the day hired the rest of the jodelers,