Here we met, I should say, twenty-five hundred of our own countrymen, more or less, all spending money with great energy, and being reprehended for so doing by the travellers of all other nations as price-raisers. If the Americans would look at their bills and condescend to be economical, as the English are, it would be in quite as good taste; but the trouble with some travellers is that they have not had money a great while, and any new sensation is apt to be uncontrollable.
Lucerne is a pretty Swiss town, with eleven thousand souls, mostly Catholics. We saw a great demonstration, ten thousand strong, of the "men of Uri" and the other cantons, who went about singing their national songs. Had they retained their costumes how interesting it would have been! but they wore the disenchanting clothes of the nineteenth century, and were simply short and ugly men with spectacles. But Lucerne has an unrivalled organ. You are allowed to go and hear it at twilight, and as you gather, wanderers of all nations, in the dimly lighted church you are in the mood for music —
"As o'er the keys the musing organist,
Beginning fitfully and far away,
First lets his fingers wander as they list,
To build a bridge from dreamland for his lay."
Then come wondrous chords, great harmonies, clashing weapons; then you seem to hear monks chanting their evening hymn; then a single voice — almost a voice from heaven, so pure, so exalted, so sadly sweet; again it becomes human, freighted with human sorrows, human tears. It soars upward in the Ave Maria. Then rises a chorus of voices chanting the hymn of peace or a requiem for the dead; now the shrill voices of the nuns;
