We left Switzerland, as we entered it, in a rain,—­a kind of double baptism that may have been necessary, and was certainly not too heavy a price to pay for the privileges of the wonderful country.  The wind blew freshly, and swept a shower over the deck of the little steamboat, on board of which we stepped from the shabby little pier and town of Romanshorn.  After the other Swiss lakes, Constance is tame, except at the southern end, beyond which rise the Appenzell range and the wooded peaks of the Bavarian hills.  Through the dash of rain, and under the promise of a magnificent rainbow,—­rainbows don’t mean anything in Switzerland, and have no office as weather-prophets, except to assure you, that, as it rains to-day, so it will rain tomorrow,—­we skirted the lower bend of the lake,—­and at twilight sailed into the little harbor of Lindau, through the narrow entrance between the piers, on one of which is a small lighthouse, and on the other sits upright a gigantic stone lion, —­a fine enough figure of a Bavarian lion, but with a comical, wide-awake, and expectant expression of countenance, as if he might bark right out at any minute, and become a dog.  Yet in the moonlight, shortly afterward, the lion looked very grand and stately, as he sat regarding the softly plashing waves, and the high, drifting clouds, and the old Roman tower by the bridge which connects the Island of Lindau with the mainland, and thinking perhaps, if stone lions ever do think, of the time when Roman galleys sailed on Lake Constance, and when Lindau was an imperial town with a thriving trade.

On board the little steamer was an American, accompanied by two ladies, and traveling, I thought, for their gratification, who was very anxious to get on faster than he was able to do,—­though why any one should desire to go fast in Europe I do not know.  One easily falls into the habit of the country, to take things easily, to go when the slow German fates will, and not to worry one’s self beforehand about times and connections.  But the American was in a fever of impatience, desirous, if possible, to get on that night.  I knew he was from the Land of the Free by a phrase I heard him use in the cars:  he said, “I’ll bet a dollar.”  Yet I must flatter myself that Americans do not always thus betray themselves.  I happened, on the Isle of Wight, to hear a bland landlord “blow up” his glib-tongued son because the latter had not driven a stiffer bargain with us for the hire of a carriage round the island.

“Didn’t you know they were Americans?” asks the irate father.  “I knew it at once.”

“No,” replies young hopeful:  “they didn’t say guess once.”