the Falls of the Rhine, the Lake of Constance—­in fact it was a memorable holiday of travel.  Of late we had been tramping slowly up the Valley of the Reuss.  It was a delightful time.  It was much more like a stroll than a tramp.  Landing from a Lake of Lucerne steamer in Fluellen, we found ourselves at the end of the second day, with the dusk overtaking our leisurely footsteps, a little way beyond Hospenthal.  This is not the day on which the remark was made:  in the shadows of the deep valley and with the habitations of men left some way behind, our thoughts ran not upon the ethics of conduct but upon the simpler human problem of shelter and food.  There did not seem anything of the kind in sight, and we were thinking of turning back when suddenly at a bend of the road we came upon a building, ghostly in the twilight.

At that time the work on the St. Gothard Tunnel was going on, and that magnificent enterprise of burrowing was directly responsible for the unexpected building, standing all alone upon the very roots of the mountains.  It was long though not big at all; it was low; it was built of boards, without ornamentation, in barrack-hut style, with the white window-frames quite flush with the yellow face of its plain front.  And yet it was an hotel; it had even a name which I have forgotten.  But there was no gold-laced door-keeper at its humble door.  A plain but vigorous servant-girl answered our inquiries, then a man and woman who owned the place appeared.  It was clear that no travellers were expected, or perhaps even desired, in this strange hostelry, which in its severe style resembled the house which surmounts the unseaworthy-looking hulls of the toy Noah’s Arks, the universal possession of European childhood.  However, its roof was not hinged and it was not full to the brim of slab-sided and painted animals of wood.  Even the live tourist animal was nowhere in evidence.  We had something to eat in a long, narrow room at one end of a long, narrow table, which, to my tired perception and to my sleepy eyes, seemed as if it would tilt up like a see-saw plank, since there was no one at the other end to balance it against our two dusty and travel-stained figures.  Then we hastened upstairs to bed in a room smelling of pine planks, and I was fast asleep before my head touched the pillow.

In the morning my tutor (he was a student of the Cracow University) woke me up early, and as we were dressing remarked:  “There seems to be a lot of people staying in this hotel.  I have heard a noise of talking up till 11 o’clock?” This statement surprised me; I had heard no noise whatever, having slept like a top.