To get to Geneva you provide yourself with a passport, a book of rail and steamer tickets, a ticket for a seat in the Pulman car, a ticket for a berth in the sleeping-car and a ticket for the registration of your luggage.  In short, by the time you are in France you will have had pass through your hands one passport and eleven tickets; and the first thing you will do upon settling down into the French train is to compete and intrigue to get a twelfth ticket for your lunch.  You will find that this useless ticket will follow you all the way to Geneva and will always assert itself when you are accosted by a ticket inspector.  I even know a traveller who arrived eventually at the Swiss frontier with no other paper of identity or justification; for a passport which should have given his name, address, motive for travelling, shape of mouth, size of nose and any other peculiarities, he could only tender documentary evidence of his having eaten the nineteenth lunch of the first series of the day before.

Two things catch the eye about Geneva.  In the first place it is on a lake, and in the second place it is always brimful of International Unions, Leagues, Congresses and Conferences.  The lake is navigated in the season by a fleet of sizeable steamers, and one of these, a two-hundred tonner, used to call every morning of the season at the little pier outside my house to take me to business, and brought me back again every evening.  By the pier rests an old, old man whose only duty in life it is to catch the hawser as it is thrown from the incoming liner.  Twice a day for four months that hawser was thrown for the old man to catch, and twice a day for four months he missed it.  I spoke to him about this on the last day, and he showed a fine courage which nothing can depress.  Next season he means to try again.  As he will be out of a job in the interval I am plotting to secure for him the post of naval expert to the League.

Turning from the lake to the international delegates, who abound in Geneva, it is to be noted that the last lot here were the International Congress of Leagues of Women.  Their main agendum was to pronounce their complete independence of men.  One of these delegates went for a row on the lake and fell in.  She was pulled out again by a man.

You will find that Geneva was nominated as the seat of the League in the Peace Treaty of Versailles.  Ever since, the people of Geneva have been busy conjecturing what the League of Nations will do upon its arrival in Geneva.  It will do exactly what you and I would do in similar circumstances.  Stepping out of the station exit it will hurry off to its hotel.  But when Leagues go to hotels they buy the darned things outright.  I don’t know what they do about notices on the walls; alter some and remove others, no doubt.  The international delegates will be requested to ring once for the political expert, twice for the military expert and three times for the naval expert.  If my old man gets the last-named job they will have to ring rather more than three times if they want him to come up at once and discuss schemes for readjusting the various oceans.