I HAVE alluded to the intense blaze of the sun upon the day of our tryst with the newly-arrived travelers. Until then we had not suffered from heat in Switzerland. Our pension was a stone building, with spacious, high-ceiled rooms, in which the breeze from lake and icy mountains was ever astir, and we were rarely abroad excepting at morning and evening.

On our way home the next afternoon, after a delightful sail to Fluelen and back, and a visit to Altorf, we met Boy and nurse at the gate of the public park where he and I went daily for the “milk-cure.” Three or four cows and twice as many goats were driven into the enclosure at five o’clock and tethered at the door of a rustic pavilion. There they were milked, and invalids and children drank the liquid warm from great tumblers like beer-glasses. Goats’ milk had been prescribed for me, and I could endure the taste when it was fresh. When cold, the flavor was peculiar and unpleasant. Boy usually relished his deep draught of cows’ milk, but to-day he would not touch it. He had a grievance, too, that had tried temper and pride.

“Things bother me so, mamma! The people here are so foolish! A woman had some fruit to sell down there by the Schweizerhof and said a long nonsense to me. I said—‘Non capisco Tedeseo!’ and everybody laughed. It’s good Italian, and means—‘I don’t understand a word of your horrid old Dutch!’”

He began to sob. Papa picked him up and carried him to our carriage. When we were in our rooms, the Invaluable had her story to tell. Boy had taken a long walk with his sister in the forenoon and had come home complaining of headache and violent nausea. Seeming better toward evening, he had insisted upon going for his milk, and she had hoped the cooler air would refresh him.

“I want to go back where people have sense and can understand me!” moaned the little fellow. “I’m not a bit sick! I’m discouraged!”

The fever ran high all night. The following day we summoned Dr. Steiger, the best physician in Lucerne. There are few better anywhere. For the next fortnight—the saddest of our exile—his visits were the brightest gleams in the chamber shadowed by such wild fears as we hardly dared avow to one another. Cheerful, intelligent, kindly, the doctor would have been welcome had his treatment of our stricken child been less manifestly skillful.

“He is a sick boy. But you are brave?” looking around at us from his seat at the pillow of the delirious patient. “I will tell you the truth. He has had a coup de soleil. He is likely to have a long fever. It is not typhoid yet, but it may be, by and by. Strangers unused to the sun in Switzerland are often seriously affected by it. When he gets well, you will be careful of him for one, two, three years. Now—we will do our best for him. I have four boys of my own. And—”a quick glance at me—“I know what is the mother’s heart!”

I would not review, even in thought, the three weeks succeeding this decision, were it not that I cannot bring myself to withhold the tribute of grateful hearts—then so heavy! to the abundant goodness of the stranger-physician whose name we had never heard until our boy’s illness, and to the sympathy and active kindness that were our portion from every boarder in a house filled with English and Americans. Jellies, ices, fruit, flowers, toys, were handed in at Boy’s door, with tender inquiries, from hour to hour, as to his condition. Music-loving girls who had scarcely left the piano silent for fifteen minutes during the day and evening, now closed it lest the sufferer should be disturbed by the sound, his chamber being directly over the salon. Every foot trod softly upon the polished floor of the upper hall and the stairs, and offers of personal service were as earnest and frequent as if we had dwelt among our own people. I write it down with a swelling heart that presses the tears to my eyes. For Heaven knows how sore was our need of friendly offices and Good Samaritans at that juncture! The house was handsome, well-furnished and kept beautifully clean. Well people fared comfortably enough. But, for sickness we found, as we had everywhere else—notably at Cadenabbia—no provision whatever, and with regard to dietetic cookery, depths of ignorance that confounded us.

I could not for money—much less for love or pity’s sake—get a cup of gruel or beef-tea made in the kitchen. When Boy was convalescent and his life depended upon the judicious administration of nourishment, I tried to have some oatmeal porridge cooked, according to directions, below stairs, paying well for the privilege. There were two pounds of oatmeal in the package. I ordered half-a-cupful to be boiled a long time in a given quantity of water, stirred up often from the bottom and slightly salted. The cook—a professed cordon bleu—cooked it all at once and sent it up in a prodigious tureen,—a gallon of soft, grayish paste, seasoned with pepper, salt, lemon-peel and chopped garlic!

I did give the landlady credit for an inexplicable fit of motherly kindness when, at length, fish and birds, nicely broiled, came up, every day or two, to brighten the pale little face laid against the cushions of his lounge; thanked her for them heartily and with emotion.

“It is not’ing!” she said, beaming (as when was she not?) “I only wis’ to know dat de beautiful child ees better. I t’ought he could taste de feesh.”

I was grateful and unsuspicious for a week, recanting, repentantly, the hard things I had said of continental human nature, and admitting Madame to the honorable list of exceptions, headed—far above hers—by Dr. Steiger’s name. Then, chancing to come down-stairs one day, shod with the “shoes of silence” I wore in the sick-room, I trod upon the heels of a handsome young Englishman, almost a stranger to me, who was spending the honeymoon with his bride in Switzerland. He had been three weeks in this house, and we had not exchanged ten sentences with him or his wife. He stood now in the hall, his back toward me, in close conference with Madame, our hostess. He was in sporting-costume, fishing-rod on shoulder. Madame held a fine fish, just caught, and was receiving his instructions delivered in excellent French:

“You will see that it is broiled—with care—you know, and sent, as you have done the others, to the little sick boy in No. 10. And this is for the cook!”

There was the chink of coin. The cook! whom I had feed generously and regularly for preparing the game and fish so acceptable to my child!

I stepped forward. “It is you, then, Mr. N——, whom I should thank!” with a two-edged glance that meant confusion to Madame, acknowledgment and apology to the real benefactor.

The young Briton blushed as if detected in a crime. Madame smiled, without blushing, and bustled off to the kitchen.

Happily, Americans are not without “contrivances” even on the Continent. A summary of ours while the fever-patient needed delicate food such as American nurses and mothers love to prepare, may be useful to other wayfarers on the “road to Jericho.” We carried our spirit-lamp and kettle with us everywhere. Besides these, I bought a small tin saucepan with a cover and a tin plate; made a gridiron of a piece of stout wire, and set up a hospital kitchen in one of our rooms at an open window that took smoke and odor out of the way. Here, for a month, we made beef-tea, broiled birds and steak and chops—the meat bought by ourselves in the town; cooked omelettes, gruel, arrowroot jelly, custards, and boiled the water for our “afternoon tea.” Cream-toast was another culinary success, but the bread was toasted down-stairs by the Invaluable when she could get—as she phrased it—“a chance at the kitchen-fire.” Cream and butter were heated in the covered tin-cup over our lamp.

For fifteen days, the fever ran without intermission, sometimes so fiercely that the brain raged into frenzied wanderings; for three weeks, our Swiss doctor came morning, afternoon or evening—sometimes all three; for a month, our boy was a prisoner to his own room, and we attended upon his convalescence before daring to strike camp and move northward into Germany. And all in consequence of that long walk, without shade of trees or umbrella, under the treacherous Swiss sun! We had had our lesson. I pass it on to those who may be willing to profit thereby.

But for this unfortunate break in our plans we would have had a happy month in Lucerne. We could not stir out of doors without meeting friends from over the sea, and, every day, cards, inscribed with familiar names, were brought in to us. All the American traveling-world goes to the Swiss lakes and crosses the Passes in the short summer. Lucerne is picturesque in itself and environs. The lake ranks next to Como in beauty; the drives and walks in and about it are attractive in scenery and associations. Of the healthfulness of those portions of the town lying along the quay we had grave doubts. The cellars are flooded after every heavy rain, and copious rains are a feature of the climate. Our morning walk for our letters lay past one of the largest hotels, patronized extensively by English and Americans. A rainy night or day was sure to be followed by an opening of the rear basement windows, and a pumping into the gutter of hogsheads of muddy water. The rapid evaporation of the surplus moisture under the mid-day heats must have filled the atmosphere with noxious exhalations.

The evening-scene on the quay was brilliant. Hundreds of strollers thronged the broad walks beneath the trees; the great fountain threw a column of spray fifty feet into the air. A fine band played until ten o’clock before the HÔtel National; pleasure-boats shot to and fro upon the water; the lamps of the long bridge sparkled—a double row—in the glassy depths. Upon certain evenings, the Lion held levees, being illuminated by colored lights thrown upon the massive limbs that seemed to quiver under their play, and upon the roll of honor of those who died for their queen and for their oath’s sake.

Lucerne is very German in tongue and character—a marked and unpleasant change to those who enter Switzerland from the Italian side. Ears used to the flowing numbers of the most musical language spoken by man, are positively pained by the harsh jargon that responds to his effort to make himself intelligible. The English and French of the shopkeepers and waiters, being filtered through the same foul medium, is equally detestable. Our friend, Dr. Steiger, spoke all three languages well and with a scholarly intelligence that made his English a model of conciseness and perspicuity. Our experiences and difficulties with other of the native residents would make a long chapter of cross-purposes.

Three times a week the fruit-market is held in the arcades of the old town. One reaches them by crooked streets and flights of stone steps, beginning in obscure corners and zigzagging down to the green Reuss, swirling under its bridges and foaming past the light-house tower to its confluence with the Lake. The summer fruits were, to our ideas, an incongruous array. Strawberries—the small, dark-red “Alpine,” conical in shape, spicily sweet in flavor; raspberries, white, scarlet and yellow; green and purple figs; nectarines; plums in great variety and abundance; apples, peaches and pears; English medlars and gooseberries; Italian nespoli and early grapes were a tempting variety. We had begun to eat strawberries in April in Rome. We had them on our dessert-table in Geneva in November.

The second time I went to the fruit-market, I took Prima as interpreter. The peasant-hucksters were obtuse to the pantomime I had practised successfully with the Italians. The shine of coin in the left palm while the right hand designated fruit and weight—everything being sold from the scales—elicited only a stolid stare and gruff “Nein,” the intonation of which was the acme of dull indifference. Thick of tongue and slow of wit, they cared as little for what we said as for what we were. Intelligence and curiosity may not always go hand-in-hand, but where both are absent, what the Yankees call “a trade,” is a disheartening enterprise. Having at my side a young lady who “knew” German, I advanced boldly into the aisle between the stalls of the sellers, and said—“Ask this woman the price of those gooseberries.” Big, red and hairy as Esau, they were a lure to American eyes and palates. Prima put the question with a glibness truly pleasing to the maternal heart, however the gutturals might grate upon the ear. The vender’s countenance did not light up, but she answered readily, if monotonously. Prima stared at her, disconcerted.

“What does she say? That is not German!”

Italian and French were tried. The woman gazed heavily at the Wasserthurm, the quaint tower rising from the middle of the river near the covered bridge of the CapelbrÜcke, and remained as unmoved as that antique land-mark.

“This has ceased to be amusing!” struck in Caput, imperatively, and turning about, made proclamation in the market-place—“Is there nobody here who can speak English?”

A little man peeped from a door behind the stall. “I can!”

The two monosyllables were the “Open Sesame” to the fruity wealth that had been Tantalus apples and a Barmecide banquet and whatever else typifies unfulfilled desire to us, up to the moment of his appearing.

“How odd that the woman should understand me when I did not comprehend a word she said!” meditated our discomfited interpreter, aloud.

The enigma was solved at lunch, where the story was told and the ridiculous element made the most of. A pretty little Russian lady was my vis-À-vis. The Russians we met abroad were, almost without exception, accomplished linguists. They are compelled they say, jestingly, to learn the tongues of other peoples, since few have the courage and patience to master theirs. My neighbor’s English caused us to fall in love with our own language. Her speech with her children was in French, and she conversed with German gentlemen at the table with equal facility.

“Your daughter is quite correct in her description of the Lucerne dialect,” she said, rounding each syllable with slow grace that was not punctiliousness. “It is a vile mongrel of which the inhabitants may well be ashamed. I have much difficulty in comprehending their simplest phrases, and I lived in Germany five years. The Germans would disown the patois. It is a provincial composite. The better classes understand, but will not speak it.”

I take occasion to say here, having enumerated the summer-delicacies offered for sale in the Lucerne market, that those of our countrypeople who visit Europe with the hope of feasting upon such products of orchard and garden as they leave behind them, are doomed to sore disappointment. Years ago, I heard Dr. E. D. G. Prime of the “New York Observer,” in his delightful lecture, “All Around the World,” assert that “the finest fruit-market upon the globe is New York City.” We smiled incredulously, thinking of East Indian pine-apples and mangoes, Seville oranges and Smyrna grapes. We came home from our briefer pilgrimage, wiser, and thankfully content. We murmured, not marveled at the pitiful display of open-air fruit in England, remembering the Frenchman’s declaration that baked apples were the only ripe fruit he had tasted in that cloudy isle. Plums and apricots there are of fair quality, the trees being trained upon sunny walls, but the prices of these are moderate only by contrast with those demanded for other things. Peaches are sixpence—(twelve-and-a-half cents) each. Grapes are reared almost entirely in hot-houses, and sell in Covent Garden market at two and three dollars a pound. Pears, comparable to the Bartlett, Seckel or Flemish Beauty are nowhere to be had, and, in the same celebrated market of fruit and flowers, “American apples” were pressed upon us as the finest, and, therefore, costliest of their kind. Gooseberries are plentiful and quite cheap, as are cherries and currants. Pine-apples in England—“pines”—bring a guinea or a half-guinea apiece, being also, hot-house products.

“Do the poor eat no fruit?” I asked our Leamington fruiterer, an intelligent man whose wares were choice and varied—for that latitude.

“They are permitted to pick blackberries and sloes in the edges. Of course, pines and peaches are forbidden luxuries to people in their station.”

He might have added—“And plums at two cents, apricots at four, pears at five cents apiece, and strawberries”—charged against us by our landlady at half-a-dollar per quart in the height of the season. Tomatoes ranged from six to twelve cents apiece! asparagus was scarce and frightfully dear; green peas, as a spring luxury, were likewise intended for rich men’s tables. For Indian corn, sweet potatoes, egg-plants, Lima and string-beans, summer squash and salsify we inquired in vain. Nor had any English people to whom we named these ever seen them in their country. Many had never so much as heard that such things were, and asked superciliously—“And are they really tolerable—eatable, you know?”

Our English boarders in Lucerne smiled, indulgent of our national peculiarities,—but very broadly—at seeing us one day at the pension-table, eat raw tomatoes as salad, with oil, vinegar, pepper and salt. They were set in the centre of the board as a part of the dessert, but our instructions to the waiters broke up the order of their serving. Madame and daughters confessed, afterward, that they were not certain where they belonged, but had heard that Americans liked tomatoes, and so procured them.

Matters mended, in these respects, as we moved southward. When the weather is too hot, and the climate too unwholesome for foreigners to tarry in Southern France and Italy, the natives revel in berries, peaches and melons. We ate delicious grapes in Florence as late as the first of December, and a few in Rome. By New Year’s Day, not a bunch of fresh ones was exhibited in shops, at this time, filled with sour oranges, sweet, aromatic mandarini, mediocre apples and drying nespoli and medlars. The nespoli, let me remark, is a hybrid between the date and plum, with an added cross of the persimmon. Indeed, it resembles this last in color and shape, also, in the acerbity that mingles with the acid of the unripe fruit. When fully matured they are very good, when partially dried, not unlike dates in appearance and flavor. Medlars are popular in England, and in request in Paris. To us, they were from first to last, disagreeable. To be candid, the taste and texture of the pulp were precisely those of rotten apples. We thought them decayed, until told that they were only fully ripe. In these circumstances how tantalizing were reminiscences of Newtown and Albemarle pippins, of Northern Spy and Seek-no-further! We could have sat us down on the pavement of the Piazza di Spagna, and, hidden by mountains of intolerably tart oranges, plained as did the mixed multitude at Taberah, that our souls were dried away in remembering the winter luxuries of which we did eat freely in our own land; the Catawba, Isabella and Diana grapes, close packed in purple layers in neat boxes for family use, late pears and all-the-year-round sweet oranges; plump, paly-green Malaga and amethyst Lisbon grapes, retailed at thirty and twenty-five cents per pound. Were we not now upon the same side of the ocean with Lisbon and Malaga? It was nearly impossible to credit the scarcity of these sun bright lands in what we had so long received and enjoyed as everyday mercies to people of very moderate means.

As to bananas, we did not see a dozen in two years. I did not taste one in all that time. Desiccated tomatoes and mushrooms are sold in Italian cities by the string. Canned vegetables are an American “notion.” Brown, in the Via della Croce in Rome, had fresh oysters—American—for eighty cents a can. As the daintiest canned peas and the useful champignons are imported by United States grocers direct from France, it was odd that we could not have them, for the asking, in Switzerland and Italy. Esculents for salad grow there out of doors all winter, including several varieties not cultivated with us. Potatoes, spinach, rice, celery,—cooked and raw—onions, cabbage, cauliflower, macaroni, a root known as “dog-fennel,” and,—leading them all in the frequency of its appearing, but not, to most people’s taste, in excellence,—artichokes—are the vegetable bill-of-fare. If there are eight courses at dinner, the probability is that but two of them will be vegetables. An eight-course dinner on the Continent may be a very plain affair, important as it sounds, and the diner-out be hardly able to satisfy a healthy appetite ‘though he partake of each dish. Soup is the first course;—sometimes, nourishing and palatable,—as often, thin and poor. Fish succeeds. If it be salmon, whitebait, whitings, soles or fresh sardines, it is usually good. But, beyond Paris, we were rarely served on the Continent with any of these, except the last-named, that could be truthfully called, “fresh.” The sardines of Naples and Venice, just from the water, are simply delicious.

Meat comes next—a substantial dish, and an entrÉe of some sort. These are separated by a course consisting of a single vegetable, potatoes or stewed celery or macaroni au gratin, or, perhaps, cauliflower with sauce tartare. Another vegetable precedes the first meat-course. Salad follows the second. Then, we have pastry or some other sweet, and dessert, meaning fruit, nuts and bon-bons. Finally, coffee. The dinner is À la Russe, no dishes being set upon the table, excepting the dessert. The carving is done in another room and the guests are not tempted to gluttony by the amount served to each.

“If they would only give me a potato with my boiled fish!” lamented an American to me, once. “Or serve the green peas with the lamb! And mutton-chops and tomato-sauce are as naturally conjoined in the educated mind as the English q and u!”

On the Continent the exception to the rule he objurgated is the serving of chicken and salad—lettuce, endive or chervil,—together upon a hot plate. The vinegar and oil cool the chicken. The heated plate wilts and toughens the salad. Common sense might have foretold the result. But chicken-and-salad continue to hold their rank in the culinary succession, and are eaten without protest by those who are loudest in ridicule and condemnation of transatlantic solecisms.