least individual about their railway stations.  We went on that Bodensee, however, I remember with animosity, taking a small steamer at Constance for Neuhausen.  It was a gray and sulky Bodensee, full of little dull waves and a cold head wind that never changed its mind for a moment.  Isabel and I huddled together for comfort on the very hard wooden seat that ran round the deck, and the depth of our misery may be gathered from the fact that, when the wind caught Isabel’s floral hat under the brim and cast it suddenly into that body of water, neither of us looked round!  Mrs. Portheris was very much annoyed at our unhappy indifference.  She implied that it was precisely to enable Isabel to stop a steamer on the Bodensee in an emergency of this sort that she had had her taught German.  Dicky told me privately that if it had happened a week before he would have gone overboard in pursuit, for the sake of business, without hesitation, but, under the present happy circumstances, he preferred the prospect of buying a new hat.  Nothing else actually transpired during the afternoon, though there were times when other events seemed as precipitant, to most of us, as upon the tossing Atlantic, and we made port without having realised anything about the Bodensee, except that we would rather not be on it.

Neuhausen was the port, but Schaffhausen was of course the place, two or three dusty miles along a river the identity of which revealed itself to Mrs. Portheris through the hotel omnibus windows as an inspiration.  “Do we all fully understand,” she demanded, “that we are looking upon the Rhine?” And we endeavoured to do so, though the Senator said that if it were not so intimately connected with the lake we had just been delivered from he would have felt more cordial about it.  I should like to have it understood that relations were hardly what might be called strained at this time between the Senator and myself.  There were subjects which we avoided, and we had enough regard for our dignity, respectively, not to drop into personalities whatever we did, but we had a modus vivendi, we got along.  Dicky maintained a noble and pained reserve, giving poppa hours of thought, out of which he emerged with the almost visible reflection that a Wick never changed his mind.

There was a garden with funny little flowers in it which went out of fashion in America about twenty years ago.  There was also a chalet in the garden, where we saw at once that we could buy cuckoo clocks and edelweiss and German lace if we wanted to.  There was a big hotel full of people speaking strange languages—­by this time we all sympathised with Mr. Mafferton in his resentment of foreigners in Continental hotels; as he said, one expected them to do their travelling in England.  There were the “Laufen” foaming down the valley under the dining room windows, there were the Swiss waitresses in short petticoats and velvet bodices and white chemisettes, and at the dinner table, sitting precisely opposite, there were the Malts.  Mr. Malt, Mrs. Malt, Emmeline Malt, and Miss Callis, not one of them missing.  The Malts whom we had left at Rome, left in the same hotel with Count Filgiatti, and to some purpose apparently, for seated attentively next to Mrs. Malt there also was that diminutive nobleman.