to fatigue us.  We grew very tired of seeing wooden quails and chickens picking and strutting around clock-faces, and still more tired of seeing wooden images of the alleged chamois skipping about wooden rocks, or lying upon them in family groups, or peering alertly up from behind them.  The first day, I would have bought a hundred and fifty of these clocks if I had the money—­and I did buy three —­but on the third day the disease had run its course, I had convalesced, and was in the market once more—­trying to sell.  However, I had no luck; which was just as well, for the things will be pretty enough, no doubt, when I get them home.

For years my pet aversion had been the cuckoo clock; now here I was, at last, right in the creature’s home; so wherever I went that distressing “HOO’hoo!  HOO’hoo!  HOO’hoo!” was always in my ears.  For a nervous man, this was a fine state of things.  Some sounds are hatefuler than others, but no sound is quite so inane, and silly, and aggravating as the “HOO’hoo” of a cuckoo clock, I think.  I bought one, and am carrying it home to a certain person; for I have always said that if the opportunity ever happened, I would do that man an ill turn.  What I meant, was, that I would break one of his legs, or something of that sort; but in Lucerne I instantly saw that I could impair his mind.  That would be more lasting, and more satisfactory every way.  So I bought the cuckoo clock; and if I ever get home with it, he is “my meat,” as they say in the mines.  I thought of another candidate—­a book-reviewer whom I could name if I wanted to—­but after thinking it over, I didn’t buy him a clock.  I couldn’t injure his mind.

We visited the two long, covered wooden bridges which span the green and brilliant Reuss just below where it goes plunging and hurrahing out of the lake.  These rambling, sway-backed tunnels are very attractive things, with their alcoved outlooks upon the lovely and inspiriting water.  They contain two or three hundred queer old pictures, by old Swiss masters—­old boss sign-painters, who flourished before the decadence of art.

The lake is alive with fishes, plainly visible to the eye, for the water is very clear.  The parapets in front of the hotels were usually fringed with fishers of all ages.  One day I thought I would stop and see a fish caught.  The result brought back to my mind, very forcibly, a circumstance which I had not thought of before for twelve years.  This one: 

THE MAN WHO PUT UP AT GADSBY’S

When my odd friend Riley and I were newspaper correspondents in Washington, in the winter of ’67, we were coming down Pennsylvania Avenue one night, near midnight, in a driving storm of snow, when the flash of a street-lamp fell upon a man who was eagerly tearing along in the opposite direction.  “This is lucky!  You are Mr. Riley, ain’t you?”

Riley was the most self-possessed and solemnly deliberate person in the republic.  He stopped, looked his man over from head to foot, and finally said: