The Sun.
London, England, 1865-09-13 00:00:00

whispering tones of the well-bred company are a
check on their uproarious outbreaks ; the frigid
manners of the strongly disciplined waiters dis-
courage their jocular sallies. All is dull, quiet,
formal, dismal, for them ; they seldom venture into
these precincts;_ more rarely abide in them ; hardly
ever quit them without a loud declaration of their
firm purpose never to revisit them.
It is not possible to imagine anything more de-
cent, orderly, and respectable than the grand saloon
at the Schweizerhof. It is a splendid apartment on
gigintic proportions, built in the most correct and
elegant style. It is a kind of Kursaal or Conver-
sation-Haus, only without the roulette and trente-et-
quarante tables, and without that company from
Athens and Boheme which enlivens the reunions of
Homburg and Baden. It was Sunday yesterday ;
few of the English were out for excursions ; many
had congregated at Lucerne, for the convenience of
the fine new church they have erected in the centre
of what may be called the English town. It was
pleasant to see them, the girls sailing in in all their
tidy decent muslin, coming down and sitting in family
groups at the various tables to breakfast ; pleasanter
still to see them walking in a well-suiteddemurepro-
cession to their places at the long tables for their 5
o'clock dinner—their own late dinner ; no connexion
with the Continental feed at 1 o'clock in the hottest
hours of the day. Charming it was between meals,
or between the church services, to see the same
groups at the literary end of the saloon—for the
enormous hall, divided into two compartments by a
double row of stately pillars, answers both purposes
at its two opposite extremities--to see the same
groups, I said, pore on the Saturday morning papers
from home, look over albums and caricatures, engage
in desultory talk ; all their proverbial insular re-
straint put aside, the ice of their national reserve
broken, and forming altogether, if not quite a
family, at least quite a friendly circle, with less stiff-
ness and ceremony than one would observe in many
a London drawing-room. A few well-broken Yan-
kees claimed right of cousinship with the statelier
Briton, and their somewhat pushing familiarity and
active inquisitiveness contributed, perhaps, not a
little to the expansion of souls and liveliness of talk.
Fewer still were the Germans, and other Conti-
nentals, but they were evidently of that class who do
not object to a house full of English, a class who
rather hover about the English, try to understand
them, and like them in proportion. Presently, as the
shades of evening fell, the groups, one after another,
adjourned to the terrace outside, under the horse-
chestnut trees, on the lake. There was the lake to be
wooed and worshipped, the darkening hills, the long
smooth ridge of the Righi, the high, rugged crest of
Pilatus. There were plans for the morning move ;
parties made up ; a bantering with the guides ; a
bargaining for horses or carriages; then a yawn
here and there; a complaint of weariness; a fore-
thought of early rising on the morrow. Group after
group vanished. By 9 all was quiet without and
within the hotel.