But we were.  The sun was well up when we got to the exhibition-ground.

On our way up we met the crowd returning—­men and women dressed in all sorts of queer costumes, and exhibiting all degrees of cold and wretchedness in their gaits and countenances.  A dozen still remained on the ground when we reached there, huddled together about the scaffold with their backs to the bitter wind.  They had their red guide-books open at the diagram of the view, and were painfully picking out the several mountains and trying to impress their names and positions on their memories.  It was one of the saddest sights I ever saw.

Two sides of this place were guarded by railings, to keep people from being blown over the precipices.  The view, looking sheer down into the broad valley, eastward, from this great elevation—­almost a perpendicular mile—­was very quaint and curious.  Counties, towns, hilly ribs and ridges, wide stretches of green meadow, great forest tracts, winding streams, a dozen blue lakes, a block of busy steamboats—­we saw all this little world in unique circumstantiality of detail—­saw it just as the birds see it—­and all reduced to the smallest of scales and as sharply worked out and finished as a steel engraving.  The numerous toy villages, with tiny spires projecting out of them, were just as the children might have left them when done with play the day before; the forest tracts were diminished to cushions of moss; one or two big lakes were dwarfed to ponds, the smaller ones to puddles—­though they did not look like puddles, but like blue teardrops which had fallen and lodged in slight depressions, conformable to their shapes, among the moss-beds and the smooth levels of dainty green farm-land; the microscopic steamboats glided along, as in a city reservoir, taking a mighty time to cover the distance between ports which seemed only a yard apart; and the isthmus which separated two lakes looked as if one might stretch out on it and lie with both elbows in the water, yet we knew invisible wagons were toiling across it and finding the distance a tedious one.  This beautiful miniature world had exactly the appearance of those “relief maps” which reproduce nature precisely, with the heights and depressions and other details graduated to a reduced scale, and with the rocks, trees, lakes, etc., colored after nature.

I believed we could walk down to Waeggis or Vitznau in a day, but I knew we could go down by rail in about an hour, so I chose the latter method.  I wanted to see what it was like, anyway.  The train came along about the middle of the afternoon, and an odd thing it was.  The locomotive-boiler stood on end, and it and the whole locomotive were tilted sharply backward.  There were two passenger-cars, roofed, but wide open all around.  These cars were not tilted back, but the seats were; this enables the passenger to sit level while going down a steep incline.