From Brussels I went over to Aix-la-Chapelle, on the frontier of Germany, where I spent but little time and saw nothing of any great interest to me.  There was a fine statue of Wilhelm I., a crucifixion monument, and, as I walked along the street, I saw an advertisement for “Henry Clay Habanna Cigarren,” but not being a smoker, I can not say whether they were good or not.  In this city I had an amusing experience buying a German flag.  I couldn’t speak “Deutsch,” and she couldn’t speak English, but we made the trade all right.

My next point was Paris, the capital of the French Republic, and here I saw many interesting objects.  I first visited the church called the Madeleine.  I also walked along the famous street Champs Elysees, visited the magnificent Arch of Triumph, erected to commemorate the victories of Napoleon, and viewed the Eiffel Tower, which was completed in 1889 at a cost of a million dollars.  It contains about seven thousand tons of metal, and the platform at the top is nine hundred and eighty-five feet high.  The Tomb of Napoleon is in the Church of the Invalides, one of the finest places I had visited up to that time.  The spot where the Bastile stood is now marked by a lofty monument.  The garden of the Tuileries, Napoleon’s palace, is one of the pretty places in Paris.  Leaving this city in the morning, I journeyed all day through a beautiful farming country, and reached Pontarlier, in southern France, for the night.

My travel in Switzerland, the oldest free state in the world, was very enjoyable.  As we were entering the little republic, in which I spent two days, the train was running through a section of country that is not very rough, when, all in a moment, it passed through a tunnel overlooking a beautiful valley, bounded by mountains on the opposite side and presenting a very pleasing view.  There were many other beautiful scenes as I journeyed along, sometimes climbing the rugged mountain by a cog railway, and sometimes riding quietly over one of the beautiful Swiss lakes.  I spent a night at lovely Lucerne, on the Lake of the Four Cantons, the body of water on which William Tell figured long ago.  Lucerne is kept very clean, and presents a pleasing appearance to the tourist.

I could have gone to Fluelin by rail, but preferred to take a boat ride down the lake, and it proved to be a pleasant and enjoyable trip.  The snow could be seen lying on the tops of the mountains while the flowers were blooming in the valleys below.  Soon after leaving Fluelin, the train entered the St. Gothard Tunnel and did not reach daylight again for seventeen minutes.  This tunnel, at that time the longest in the world, is a little more than nine miles in length.  It is twenty-eight feet wide, twenty-one feet high, lined throughout with masonry, and cost eleven million four hundred thousand dollars.  Since I was in Switzerland the Simplon Tunnel has been opened.  It was begun more than six years ago by the Swiss and Italian Governments, an immense force of hands being worked on each end of it.  After laboring day and night for years, the two parties met on the twenty-fourth of February.  This tunnel, which is double, is more than twelve miles long and cost sixteen millions of dollars.