Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/162

178 great war! Nobody dared to prognosticate any thing about it.

We drove through the little Canton Zug, the entire population of which does not exceed seventeen thousand and some hundred souls, the greater number Catholics, but which yet takes its place and has a voice in the Great Federal Council, by the side of Zürich and Berne. From the summit of Albis, the sun-lighted view of Zürich, with its lake and its richly cultivated and populous shores, was indescribably beautiful.

In Zürich two suns seemed to be shining, because every countenance seemed beaming as from an inner sun. As so it was. There was a great festival there, the greatest of its kind in Switzerland. Six thousand little boys from the German Cantons, and all bearing arms as soldiers, had been for a couple of days assembled in Zürich, upon the Champs de Mars, on which they enacted the battle which took place—I do not know in what year—between the Austrians and the French in the neighborhood of the city. All these children had been quartered with kind friends in the city, and every body seemed to participate with their whole hearts in this military children's festival.

This had brought a great concourse of strangers to the place, so that there was no more room in the great Hotel Baur, neither in any other hotel. But this embarrassment became my good fortune, and I found a home and the most amiable hospitality, in a private house on the banks of the Limmat.

In the afternoon the great Thalach Street was crowded with people; faces looked out from every