‘You are bent on destroying my illusions. Oh, what a horrid row of omnibuses!’ cried Daphne, as they came out of the station and confronted about twenty of those vehicles, with doors hospitably open, and commissionaires eager to abduct new arrivals for their several hotels. ‘And where is Mont Blanc?’ she inquired, looking up at the surrounding chimney-pots. ‘At your elbow,’ answered Gerald; ‘but you may not see him to-night. The monarch of mountains is like our own gracious sovereign, and is not always visible to his subjects.’ There was a private carriage from the Beau Rivage Hotel waiting for the South Hill party, and in this they all drove down a hilly-street, which was bright and clean, and wide, and prosperous-looking, but cruelly disappointing to Daphne. Jinman and Mowser followed in the omnibus with the luggage. Mowser, like Daphne, was considerably disappointed. ‘If this is Switzerland, I call it very inferior to Brighton,’ she said snappishly. ‘Where are the glaziers and the mountings?’ ‘Did you expect to find them just outside the station?’ demanded the more travelled Jinman. ‘I have lived months in Switzerland and never seen a glashyeer. I don’t hold with having one’s bones rattled to bits upon a mule for the sake of seeing a lot of dirty ice. One can look at that any hard winter on the Serpentine.’ ‘Swisserland is Swisserland,’ answered Mowser sententiously, ‘and I don’t hold with travelling all this way from home—I’m sure I thought this blessed day would never come to an end—unless we are to see somethink out of the common.’ ‘The hotels are first-class,’ said Jinman, ‘and so are the restorongs on board the boats. Nobody need starve in Switzerland.’ ‘Can we get a decent cup of tea?’ asked Mowser. ‘There’s not a scullery-maid at South Hill as would drink such cat-lap as they brought me at the Bristol.’ Jinman explained that the teapot was an institution fully understood in the Helvetian States. ‘They’re a more domestic people than the French,’ said Jinman condescendingly, ‘I must say that for them. But Genever is the poorest place for restorongs I was ever at; plenty of your caffy-staminies, where you may drink bad wine and smoke bad cigars to your heart’s content; but hardly a decent house where you can get a dejoonay à la fourchette, or give a little bit of dinner to a friend. The hotels have got it all their own way.’ ‘They ought to,’ answered Mowser, ‘when there’s such a many of ’em. I wonder they can all pay.’