Berne is the city of bears, and were it located in Wisconsin would be called Bearville. A bear was its origin. Berthold DeZahringen, some centuries ago, killed a tremendous bear on the ground now occupied by the pretty city, and founded a town in commemoration of the event, and so the bear became as common in Berne as the lion is in England, or the eagle in America. There is bear everywhere. The public decorations are in the form of bears, the flags have bears on them, the bread is stamped with bears, the pot you drink your beer out of is in form a bear; the children's toys are all bears, and the city keeps two bear-pits, in which a dozen, more or less, fine specimens are kept. Not many years ago an English officer, who, with his lately wedded bride, were doing Switzerland, fell into one of these pits, and after a desperate struggle with the ferocious brutes, was literally torn to pieces in the sight of his agonized wife. I could not learn who it was the heart-broken wife married the next year, or whether she married well or not. It is a quaint and curious old city, and well worth a day or two. The situation is particularly beautiful, and as it has preserved the peculiar characteristics of the long ago, it is an instructive place. In the older section the streets have no sidewalks, the ground floors being made into arcades, with the houses above supported upon arches, under which you walk. It is always well for an American to visit the older portions of these cities, that he may more fervently thank heaven that his lot was cast in a new country, where there is no ancient and inconvenient rubbish to worry him. There is more of convenience in any one modern American house than there is in all of the old part Berne, or, for that matter, of any ancient city. They do well to look at, but that is all the use they should be put to. I have a profound sympathy for the people condemned to live in them. Berne is the capital of the little Republic, and here its Congress meets. Its sessions last a month, as a rule, and then Congress adjourns, and the members go home. The country is too poor to have much to steal, and consequently a short session is sufficient. I was shaved in Berne, and, speaking of shaving and barbers generally, I want to say all I have to say on that subject at once. There is no barber like the American barber, and no such comfort anywhere in barbers as we enjoy at home. Tourists have complained of the straight chairs, the dull razors, and all that sort of thing, and with some reason, though it is not as bad as represented. I have never known of any one being absolutely killed by an European barber, either at sight or sixty days.