We have thought of various ways of breaking it to him, or should we say breaking him to it?

Should we rush in and say the Swiss national debt is $——­, or ——­ kopecks, and then lead on to other topics such as the comparative heights of mountain peaks, letting the consul gradually grasp the fact that we have been in Switzerland?  Or should we call him up on the telephone and make a mysterious appointment with him, when we could blurt it out brutally?

We are a modest and diffident man, and this little problem, which would be so trifling to many, presents inscrutable hardships to us.

Another aspect of the matter is this.  We think the consul ought to know that we spent one night in Switzerland once; we think he ought to know what we were doing that night; but we also think he ought to know just why it was that we spent only one night in his beautiful country.  We don’t want him to think we hurried away because we were annoyed by anything, or because the national debt was so many rupees or piasters, or because child labor in Switzerland is——.  It is the thought that the consul and all his staff are in total ignorance of our existence that galls us.  Here we are, walking round and round the Square, bursting with information and enthusiasm about Swiss republicanism, and the consul never heard of us.  How can we summon up courage enough to tell him the truth?  That is the tragedy of Washington Square.

It was a dark, rainy night when we bicycled into Basel.  We hid been riding all day long, coming down from the dark clefts of the Black Forest, and we and our knapsack were wet through.  We had been bicycling for six weeks with no more luggage than a rucksack could hold.  We never saw such rain as fell that day we slithered and sloshed on the rugged slopes that tumble down to the Rhine at Basel. (The annual rainfall in Switzerland is——.) When we got to the little hotel at Basel we sat in the dining room with water running off us in trickles, until the head waiter glared.  And so all we saw of Switzerland was the interior of the tobacconist’s where we tried, unsuccessfully, to get some English baccy.  Then he went to bed while our garments were dried.  We stayed in bed for ten hours, reading, fairy tales and smoking and answering modestly through the transom when any one asked us questions.

The next morning we overhauled our wardrobe.  We will not particularize, but we decided that one change of duds, after six weeks’ bicycling, was not enough of a wardrobe to face the Jungfrau and the national debt and the child-labor problenm, not to speak of the anonymous President and the other sights that matter (such as the Matterhorn).  Also, our stock of tobacco had run out, and German or French tobacco we simply cannot smoke.  Even if we could get along on substitute fumigants the issue of garments was imperative.  The nearest place where we could get any clothes of the kind that we are accustomed to, the kind of clothes that are familiarly symbolized