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, and 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.