When I was dressed for dinner at six-thirty, I was too loose in some places and too tight in others, and altogether I felt slovenly and ill-conditioned.  However, the people at the table d’ho^te were no better off than I was; they had everybody’s clothes but their own on.  A long stranger recognized his ulster as soon as he saw the tail of it following me in, but nobody claimed my shirt or my drawers, though I described them as well as I was able.  I gave them to the chambermaid that night when I went to bed, and she probably found the owner, for my own things were on a chair outside my door in the morning.

There was a lovable English clergyman who did not get to the table d’ho^te at all.  His breeches had turned up missing, and without any equivalent.  He said he was not more particular than other people, but he had noticed that a clergyman at dinner without any breeches was almost sure to excite remark.

CHAPTER XXXVI [The Fiendish Fun of Alp-climbing]

We did not oversleep at St. Nicholas.  The church-bell began to ring at four-thirty in the morning, and from the length of time it continued to ring I judged that it takes the Swiss sinner a good while to get the invitation through his head.  Most church-bells in the world are of poor quality, and have a harsh and rasping sound which upsets the temper and produces much sin, but the St. Nicholas bell is a good deal the worst one that has been contrived yet, and is peculiarly maddening in its operation.  Still, it may have its right and its excuse to exist, for the community is poor and not every citizen can afford a clock, perhaps; but there cannot be any excuse for our church-bells at home, for their is no family in America without a clock, and consequently there is no fair pretext for the usual Sunday medley of dreadful sounds that issues from our steeples.  There is much more profanity in America on Sunday than is all in the other six days of the week put together, and it is of a more bitter and malignant character than the week-day profanity, too.  It is produced by the cracked-pot clangor of the cheap church-bells.

We build our churches almost without regard to cost; we rear an edifice which is an adornment to the town, and we gild it, and fresco it, and mortgage it, and do everything we can think of to perfect it, and then spoil it all by putting a bell on it which afflicts everybody who hears it, giving some the headache, others St. Vitus’s dance, and the rest the blind staggers.

An American village at ten o’clock on a summer Sunday is the quietest and peacefulest and holiest thing in nature; but it is a pretty different thing half an hour later.  Mr. Poe’s poem of the “Bells” stands incomplete to this day; but it is well enough that it is so, for the public reciter or “reader” who goes around trying to imitate the sounds of the various sorts of bells with his voice would find himself “up a stump”