He said that men cured in this way, and enabled to discard the grape system, never afterward got over the habit of talking as if they were dictating to a slow amanuensis, because they always made a pause between each two words while they sucked the substance out of an imaginary grape.  He said these were tedious people to talk with.  He said that men who had been cured by the other process were easily distinguished from the rest of mankind because they always tilted their heads back, between every two words, and swallowed a swig of imaginary whey.  He said it was an impressive thing to observe two men, who had been cured by the two processes, engaged in conversation—­said their pauses and accompanying movements were so continuous and regular that a stranger would think himself in the presence of a couple of automatic machines.  One finds out a great many wonderful things, by traveling, if he stumbles upon the right person.

I did not remain long at the Kursaal; the music was good enough, but it seemed rather tame after the cyclone of that Arkansaw expert.  Besides, my adventurous spirit had conceived a formidable enterprise—­nothing less than a trip from Interlaken, by the Gemmi and Visp, clear to Zermatt, on foot!  So it was necessary to plan the details, and get ready for an early start.  The courier (this was not the one I have just been speaking of) thought that the portier of the hotel would be able to tell us how to find our way.  And so it turned out.  He showed us the whole thing, on a relief-map, and we could see our route, with all its elevations and depressions, its villages and its rivers, as clearly as if we were sailing over it in a balloon.  A relief-map is a great thing.  The portier also wrote down each day’s journey and the nightly hotel on a piece of paper, and made our course so plain that we should never be able to get lost without high-priced outside help.

I put the courier in the care of a gentleman who was going to Lausanne, and then we went to bed, after laying out the walking-costumes and putting them into condition for instant occupation in the morning.

However, when we came down to breakfast at 8 A.M., it looked so much like rain that I hired a two-horse top-buggy for the first third of the journey.  For two or three hours we jogged along the level road which skirts the beautiful lake of Thun, with a dim and dreamlike picture of watery expanses and spectral Alpine forms always before us, veiled in a mellowing mist.  Then a steady downpour set in, and hid everything but the nearest objects.  We kept the rain out of our faces with umbrellas, and away from our bodies with the leather apron of the buggy; but the driver sat unsheltered and placidly soaked the weather in and seemed to like it.  We had the road to ourselves, and I never had a pleasanter excursion.

The weather began to clear while we were driving up a valley called the Kienthal, and presently a vast black cloud-bank in front of us dissolved away and uncurtained the grand proportions and the soaring loftiness of the Blumis Alp.  It was a sort of breath-taking surprise; for we had not supposed there was anything behind that low-hung blanket of sable cloud but level valley.  What we had been mistaking for fleeting glimpses of sky away aloft there, were really patches of the Blumis’s snowy crest caught through shredded rents in the drifting pall of vapor.