From the half-Swiss author Hermann Hesse to the full-blooded Swiss novelists is but a short step. Among these, Ernst Zahn is the most widely read and the most fruitful. A succession of voluminous novels (_Erni Beheim_, 1898, _God's Puppets_ [_Herrgottsfäden_], 1901, _Albin Indergand_, 1901, _Claire Marie_, 1904, _Luke Hochstrasser's House_, 1907, _Solitude_, 1909, _The Women of Tannò_, 1911, _The Apothecary of Little Worldville_, 1913) and an equal number of collections of short stories (_Heart Struggles_, 1893, _Echo_, 1895, _New Tales of the Mountains_, 1898, _Men and Women_, 1900, _The Shady Side_, 1903, _Heroes of Every Day_, 1905, _Those Who Come and Go_, 1908, _What Life Destroys_, 1912) have come thick and fast; and since they all deal with the everyday fortunes of the simple Alpine villagers, it was inevitable that in course of time a certain satiety dulled admiration of the sheer inexhaustible store of motifs--for nobody can say that Zahn ever exactly repeats himself. In particular, his fellow-countrymen are no longer quite willing to regard him as the Swiss novelist _par excellence_. And yet Zahn is himself the very incarnation of a fundamental trait of Swiss character; namely, the peculiar blending of practical common sense and esthetic culture. Where else than in this veritable democracy could one and the same man day in and day out serve soup to thousands of travelers, sit down at his desk after the day's work was done and gather about him the children of his imagination, and then on the morrow as president of the diet guide the deliberations of representatives of his canton of Uri? His three professions of public man, innkeeper, and author, Zahn upholds with undiscriminating pride. Ernst Zahn was born at Zurich in 1867 in the Café Littéraire, of which his father was lessee, and among whose habitués Gottfried Keller was reckoned. He took up the paternal business, beginning at the bottom of the ladder as a waiter in Geneva, Genoa, and Hastings, and in 1883 joined his father, who had meanwhile taken a lease of the railroad restaurant at Göschenen. At the last stop before entrance into the darkness of the Gotthard tunnel many a traveler to Italy has doubtless been struck by the classic features and the proud bearing of the restaurateur, without knowing that he saw before him the most widely read story-writer in the German language. As to his private life Zahn published a few years ago in the magazine _The Literary Echo_ a few details from which we quote the following: