590 DILECTA

got out, had its drawbridge entirely cut away. The guns were placed with twigs and basketwork in embrasures, soldiers stood on the walls ready, and looking out over the country with glasses. The road lay through Liechstal, where the strife was. It is a fine road, as the best in England, generally much frequented, and the country is beautiful and rich in cultivation; but on twenty-seven miles of this fine road we met neither carriage, diligence, gig, nor waggon. The land seemed deserted, only a peasant occasionally in the fields. We soon met a small band of armed peasants in the act of stopping a small market-cart which had preceded us. The man, when released, went quickly off. They let us pass. We then met two bands of armed peasants, very Irish-like in costume, and having guns swung behind or in their hands, about fifteen or twenty in each body,-part, we suppose, of the Liberals who had defeated the Tories of Basle.* They looked, and lifted their hats, and said nothing to us. Approaching Liechstal, we met a Swiss car with eight or ten gentlemen in plain clothes, well armed; also cars filled with armed peasants, and a few soldiers at their side. We entered Liechstal, and found every street barricaded breast high with pine logs, except at entrance, where an opening was left just wide enough for cart or carriage, and a gate at the other end. These gentlemen, I was afterwards told, were Polish refugees, who served the artillery of the peasantry against the Basle people, who had refused to shelter them, whilst the Liechstal people had received them kindly.”

30. And so all notice of states of siege, whether at Liechstal or anywhere else, ends in my father’s diary; and he continues in perfect tranquillity to give account of his notes on the roads, inns, and agriculture of Switzerland.

Of which, however, the reader will, I think, have pleasure in seeing some further passages, representing, not through any gilded mists of memory, but with mercantile precision of entering day by day, the aspect of Switzerland at the time when we first saw it, half a century ago:-

“18th July.-We left Berne early, and went eighteen miles to Thun. The road is one of the best possible, beginning through an avenue of trees, large and fine, and proceeding to Thun through fields of amazing beauty, bordered with fruit trees; the corn sometimes bordering the road without enclosure. The cottages, houses, farms, inns, all the way, each and all remarkable for neatness, largeness, and beauty. We left our carriage at the Freyenhof Inn, and took boat, three hours’ rowing, to Neuhaus, then one league in char-ŕ-banc; through Unterseen to Interlachen, a sweet watering-place sort of a village, with one hotel and many very elegant boarding-houses, where persons stop to take excursions to

* Papa cannot bring himself to think of anybody in Irish-like costume as Conservative. It was Basle that was liberally and Protestantially endeavouring to make the men of Liechstal abjure their Catholic errors.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]