Not the least of the traveler’s pleasure in Switzerland is derived from the English people who overrun it:  they seem to regard it as a kind of private park or preserve belonging to England; and they establish themselves at hotels, or on steamboats and diligences, with a certain air of ownership that is very pleasant.  I am not very fresh in my geology; but it is my impression that Switzerland was created especially for the English, about the year of the Magna Charta, or a little later.  The Germans who come here, and who don’t care very much what they eat, or how they sleep, provided they do not have any fresh air in diningroom or bedroom, and provided, also, that the bread is a little sour, growl a good deal about the English, and declare that they have spoiled Switzerland.  The natives, too, who live off the English, seem to thoroughly hate them; so that one is often compelled, in self-defense, to proclaim his nationality, which is like running from Scylla upon Charybdis; for, while the American is more popular, it is believed that there is no bottom to his pocket.

There was a sprig of the Church of England on the steamboat on Lake Leman, who spread himself upon a center bench, and discoursed very instructively to his friends,—­a stout, fat-faced young man in a white cravat, whose voice was at once loud and melodious, and whom our manly Oxford student set down as a man who had just rubbed through the university, and got into a scanty living.

“I met an American on the boat yesterday,” the oracle was saying to his friends, “who was really quite a pleasant fellow.  He—­ah really was, you know, quite a sensible man.  I asked him if they had anything like this in America; and he was obliged to say that they had n’t anything like it in his country; they really had n’t.  He was really quite a sensible fellow; said he was over here to do the European tour, as he called it.”

Small, sympathetic laugh from the attentive, wiry, red-faced woman on the oracle’s left, and also a chuckle, at the expense of the American, from the thin Englishman on his right, who wore a large white waistcoat, a blue veil on his hat, and a face as red as a live coal.

“Quite an admission, was n’t it, from an American?  But I think they have changed since the wah, you know.”

At the next landing, the smooth and beaming churchman was left by his friends; and he soon retired to the cabin, where I saw him self-sacrificingly denying himself the views on deck, and consoling himself with a substantial lunch and a bottle of English ale.

There is one thing to be said about the English abroad:  the variety is almost infinite.  The best acquaintances one makes will be English,—­people with no nonsense and strong individuality; and one gets no end of entertainment from the other sort.  Very different from the clergyman on the boat was the old lady at table-d’hote in one of the hotels on the lake.  One would not like to call her a delightfully