The Swiss railroad was always an object of friendly amusement with the
children, who could not get used to having the trains started by a small
Christmas-horn. They had not entirely respected the English engine, with
the shrill falsetto of its whistle, after the burly roar of our
locomotives; and the boatswain's pipe of the French conductor had
considerably diminished the dignity of a sister republic in their minds;
but this Christmas-horn was too droll. That a grown man, much more
imposingly uniformed than an American general, should blow it to start a
real train of cars was the source of patriotic sarcasm whenever its
plaintive, reedy note was heard. We had come straight through from
London, taking the sleeping-car at Calais, and rolling and bounding over
the road towards Basle in a fashion that provoked scornful comparisons
with the Pullman that had carried us so smoothly from Boston to Buffalo.
It is well to be honest, even to our own adulation, and one must confess
that the sleeping-car of the European continent is but the nervous and
hysterical daughter of the American mother of sleeping-cars. Many
express trains are run without any sleeper, and the charges for berths
are ludicrously extravagant--five dollars apiece for a single night. It
is not strange that the native prefers to doze away the night
bolt-upright, or crouched into the corners of his repellently padded
carriage, rather than toss upon the expensive pallet of the
sleeping-car, which seems hung rather with a view to affording
involuntary exercise than promoting dear-bought slumber. One advantage
of it is that if you have to leave the car at five o'clock in the
morning, you are awake and eager to do so long before that time. At the
first Swiss station we quitted it to go to Berne, which was one of the
three points where I was told by the London railway people that my
baggage would be examined. I forget the second, but the third was Berne,
and now at Delemont I looked about for the customs officers with the
anxiety which the thought of them always awakens in the human heart,
whether one has meant to smuggle or not. Even the good conscience may
suffer from the upturning of a well-packed trunk. But nobody wanted to
examine our baggage at Delemont, or at the other now-forgotten station;
and at Berne, though I labored hard in several dialects with all the
railway officials, I could not get them to open one of our ten trunks or
five valises. I was so resolute in the matter that I had some difficulty
to keep from opening them myself and levying duty upon their contents.