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am struck with the unsoldierly air of the German soldiers on fatigue duty.
They wear coarse white frocks, etc., and look like common laborers, except that a man will sometimes have a china pipe literally as long as my umbrella.
. . I had a very pleasant companion in the liveliest little Swiss school-boy .... He received a few little seed-cakes and plums at Bienne with that sense of enormous obligation so delightful in dealing with the age of thirteen, and gave much information and polite advice .... I am still always taken for English by Englishmen, but twice to-day was known as American by French Swiss-first by a bookseller who could not or would not say exactly why, and then by my little boy, who said on cross-examination that he saw Boston on a newspaper I had, but he should have known it from my speaking French; that the English spoke with much more accent than Americans, which is certainly true, our higher and more nasal voices helping us on this side of the Channel, no doubt.
Then he said, “Monsieur n'aime pas les Anglais, n'est-ce pas?”
He seemed fresh from the history of the Revolution by the way he spoke.
I said that I liked the English very well, but that being a republican I preferred my own country and that seemed to content him. “J'aime beaucoup les Americains,” he said.
(It was after the plums.)
August 27, at Lausanne
I am alone on the little wharf from which one of the 