But in music boxes and every species of musical machinery, Geneva has no rival. At your hotel the doors of some of the grand halls reel off snatches of opera as they swing upon their hinges, the caraffe from which you pour your water at table sings an air as the water gurgles from its mouth, and you shall see beautiful trees with gorgeous birds hopping from limb to limb, and all singing deliciously and naturally. Snuff boxes, tobacco boxes, cigar cases, everything of the kind has a musical attachment, that discusses sweet melody whenever opened. In short, there is such a wealth of melody, and it comes to you from such unexpected quarters, that one gets rather tired of it, and wishes he could go somewhere to get out from under it. A perpetual concert is rather too much of a good thing. And they get prices for these goods, too. My friend, the faro bankeress, who has about as much of an idea of music as a pig has of the Greek Testament, paid five thousand dollars for a tree with singing birds, because, I presume, the price was five thousand dollars. Had it been fifty dollars I doubt if she would have taken it. It didn't matter to her. Her husband's establishment could win that amount any night, and it pleased her to astonish the manufacturers of these airy nothings, with her profuseness of expenditure. I saw a duplicate sold to a man who knew something about these things for one thousand dollars. These sellers of whims know their customers at sight. CHAPTER XXXI. SWITZERLAND--SOMETHING MORE ABOUT GENEVA AND THE SWISS OF THAT ILK--THE LAKE AND RIVER. Some one remarked to the Rev. Mr. Henry Ward Beecher, before he had the little difference with Mr. Theodore Tilton, and was editing the _Independent_, "Mr. Beecher, I like your paper. You had a religious article in the last number. Now I think it is the correct thing for a church paper to have, occasionally, a religious article." So, in a record of travels, I think it entirely proper to say something, occasionally, about the country the traveler explores. The lake, at one end of which sits the beautiful though much mixed Geneva, is known abroad as Lake Geneva, but here as Lake Leman, the name given it by the Romans who once occupied this country, as they did every other country they could reach and conquer. The inlet to the lake is the River Rhone, and so, likewise, is its outlet; which is to say, the lake is simply a widening of the river, a huge goitre, as it were, on the lovely neck of that beautiful stream. The Rhone collects the waters that fall on the south side of the chain of mountains, as the Rhine does the water drainage of the north side, and is created originally, and fed as it goes, by the glaciers that adorn the mountain sides, and support Switzerland by attracting tourists.