[Illustration: Putting Up for the Winter]
And what is Engelberg? There is, first and foremost, par excellence, the feature of the place—the Hotel Titlis; then the Monastery, with the Brethren of the Bell-rope; and the Street. This is unique. Set out with a Chalet here, a Swiss Pension there, a Chapel perched up on a little hill on one side, and a neatly new-made farmhouse stuck up on the other, with cattle (not omitting their dinner-bells) dotted about here and there in the bright green meadows that creep up to, and melt into, the pine-woods stretching from the base of the grand rugged snow-capped heights that tower in every direction above, you get thoroughly impressed with the idea that the whole place is nothing but a box of toys, set out for the season (probably by the Monks), who, you feel convinced, are only waiting for the departure of the last visitor, to get out the box, and carefully pack away Chalet, and Pension, Chapel and peasant for the winter months, with a view to keeping them fresh for production in the early summer of next year.
However, whatever its fate, Engelberg is left behind us, and we find ourselves tearing down the Practical Joking Engineers’ Road at a break-neck pace, and hurrying on to Calais, once more to take our places on our steady old friend, the Calais-Douvres, that helps to deposit us finally at Charing Cross, where we are bound to admit that the air, whatever it is, is emphatically not the air of Engelberg. But everybody who has seen him, says the Dilapidated One has come back “twice the man he was”. So we must take it that our journey has not been in vain.
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ADDITIONAL TITLE.—Sir EDWIN ARNOLD, after his brilliant letters in the D.T., worthy of The Light of the World, will be remembered in Japan as a “first-rate sort of Jap.”
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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
[Illustration]