Americans -- Europe -- Fiction; Europe -- Fiction; Humorous stories; Walking -- Fiction
Next Sunday the preacher stepped softly to a back-room door to see if
the children were rightly employed. He peeped in. A chair occupied the
middle of the room, and on the back of it hung Jimmy's cap; one of
his little sisters took the cap down, nibbled at it, then passed it to
another small sister and said, "Eat of this fruit, for it is good." The
Reverend took in the situation--alas, they were playing the Expulsion
from Eden! Yet he found one little crumb of comfort. He said to himself,
"For once Jimmy has yielded the chief role--I have been wronging him, I
did not believe there was so much modesty in him; I should have expected
him to be either Adam or Eve." This crumb of comfort lasted but a very
little while; he glanced around and discovered Jimmy standing in an
imposing attitude in a corner, with a dark and deadly frown on his face.
What that meant was very plain--HE WAS IMPERSONATING THE DEITY! Think of
the guileless sublimity of that idea.
We reached Vispach at 8 P.M., only about seven hours out from St.
Nicholas. So we must have made fully a mile and a half an hour, and it
was all downhill, too, and very muddy at that. We stayed all night at
the Hotel de Soleil; I remember it because the landlady, the portier,
the waitress, and the chambermaid were not separate persons, but were
all contained in one neat and chipper suit of spotless muslin, and she
was the prettiest young creature I saw in all that region. She was the
landlord's daughter. And I remember that the only native match to her
I saw in all Europe was the young daughter of the landlord of a village
inn in the Black Forest. Why don't more people in Europe marry and keep
hotel?
Next morning we left with a family of English friends and went by train
to Brevet, and thence by boat across the lake to Ouchy (Lausanne).
Ouchy is memorable to me, not on account of its beautiful situation and
lovely surroundings--although these would make it stick long in one's
memory--but as the place where _I_ caught the London TIMES dropping into
humor. It was NOT aware of it, though. It did not do it on purpose.
An English friend called my attention to this lapse, and cut out the
reprehensible paragraph for me. Think of encountering a grin like this
on the face of that grim journal:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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