Specially interesting is the opposite side of the lake, for there the Cantons push forward their narrow necks of territory to the very lake shore--possibly as the price of their support against the Eagles of the North, whose claws have never let go their hold but this once. There, within a day's easy walk, you can pass from Canton Vaud into Canton Friburg and back again into Vaud. Then, Morat-way, you come on a little inset square of Canton Berne, whose emblematic bears also have their claws in every pie thereabout. And all the way, never a hotel for the fleecing of the foreigner! Here and there, indeed, one passes a country inn with sanded floor. More often it is only a rather superior house with a bush hung out French-fashion over the threshold. It is best, as Sweetheart and I found, to make for one of these. Generally I had known them of old, and though since then the years had done some stiff route-marching, most of their hosts and hostesses remembered me. How do you get there? Well, you cross the lake almost at its narrowest part. A little stream drains into it, slowly and in Dutch fashion, as if it were smoking a peaceful pipe by the way. Indeed, for a little while you might fancy yourself actually in Holland, so thickly are the flowers set. Only--only (and oh! the difference!) they are all wild. For I cannot help my heart beating faster when I set foot on any of the untrodden places of the earth, when I know that the next person I meet will be different from anybody I have ever met before--that he will be as frankly interested and very likely amused by me as I am by the moldy and the quaint about him--things that nobody in his senses has ever thought of looking at in that countryside for a hundred years! Privately there is often a quiet, widespread, wholly unspoken doubt of my entire sanity. That dry smile hovering about the mouth of the courteous mayor of the commune says as much. Just the same with the quick, intelligent glance that shoots betwixt husband and wife when you ask to see their barn--once the chapel of a long-destroyed monastery (Carthusians from the Italian valleys driven out by the religious wars). To them it is a barn, commodious--only a little damp. But it is nothing more. A new model one, now--all burnt brick, floor of concrete, with iron roof pillars--now _that_ would be something worth crossing the lake to look at. Hold--there is one at Estavayer! The farmer there would be glad to show it, if only Monsieur and the young lady...? No! Well, there is no accounting for tastes, and that shrug from Master Pierre said quite plainly that he had the poorest opinion of our mental capacity. But all the same Master Pierre is kind to the infirm--to those (as the Catechism says) "of weaker understanding." Yes, there is the key. We can take our own time, and when we have done we can hang it up where we got it.