I entered Switzerland at Chiasso, a little way from Lake Como in Italy, and left it at Basle near the German frontier, and all I saw was mountains--mountains--mountains--some capped with snow and some without, tall, sharp, craggy peaks, and rough, sharp declivities, with here and there a patch of grass, here and there a deep valley, here and there a lonely, wide-roofed, slab-built house with those immense projecting eaves first made familiar to me by the shabby adaptations which constitute our “L” stations in New York. The landscape hardens perceptibly a little way out of Milan. High slopes and deep lakes appear. At Chiasso, the first stop in Switzerland, I handed the guard a half-dozen letters I had written in Milan and stamped with Italian stamps. I did not know until I did this that we were out of Italy, had already changed guards and that a new crew--Swiss--was in charge of the train. “Monsieur,” he said, tapping the stamp significantly, “vous êtes en Suisse.” I do not understand French, but I did comprehend that, and I perceived also that I was talking to a Swiss. All the people on the platform were “Schweitzers” as the Germans call them, fair, chunky, stolid-looking souls without a touch of that fire or darkness so generally present a few miles south. Why should a distance of ten miles, five miles, make such an astonishing change? It is one of the strangest experiences of travel, to cross an imaginary boundary-line and find everything different; people, dress, architecture, landscape, often soil and foliage. It proves that countries are not merely soil and climatic conditions but that there is something more--a race stock which is not absolutely a product of the soil and which refuses to yield entirely to climate. Races like animals have an origin above soil and do hold their own in spite of changed or changing climatic conditions. Cross any boundary you like from one country into another and judge for yourself.