August 22 Thursday – From Sam’s notebook:

At Jungfrau Hotel, Interlaken—Superb view of the Jungfrau.

Confounded crow woke us all up at daylight.

Set your umbrellas up on these polished wood floors, down it goes. Step suddenly on them, down you go. The lowest snow on the Jf seems but little above the valley level [drawing inserted] [MTNJ 2: 141].

Young woman after table d’hote tackled an old rattle trap piano with such vigor & absence of expression with Battle of Prague & favorites of same age that she soon cleaned out the great reading room—but I staid, at first to watch the grimaces & unconscious squirms of people when she fetched a particularly lacerating chord—& afterwards I staid because the exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good—only the mediocre is unendurable. The pun is like mediocre music, neither wit nor humor—& yet now & then one sees a pun which comes so near being wit that it is funny [142].

Sam and Joe prepared for a hike over to the Matterhorn. Livy, the children and servants would meet them in Geneva, some nine days later [Rodney 106].