July 18 Sunday – The Clemens party arrived in Weggis, Switzerland, where they took residence at the Villa Bühlegg, what Dolmetsch calls, “a pension [boardinghouse] in the village of Weggis, about an hour by paddlewheel steamer up the lake from the city of Lucerne” [21].

Sam’s notebook includes a lot of description of the family’s new surroundings. In part:

It takes a person not born & reared among mountains a long long time to find out that when he has looked across the lake at a towering bulk like Pilatus once he has not yet seen it; that when he has looked across at it daily for twenty days he is not yet acquainted with it; that when he has done this for a hundred days it still has a thousand details, a thousand aspects, charms, fascinations, exquisitenesses which have not yet been revealed to him; & he will by & by come to realize that such a mountain is a sublime mystery which is full charged with beautiful secrets which only a life-time of daily observation can enable him to exhaust. Every slight drift of the sun exposes to view for a moment a detail not discovered before, & the next moment it is invisible again & may remain so for a year possibly, —until sun & atmosphere are exactly right for it once more. It may be a shepherd’s hut, high-perched among the breezy heights—it glows like a spark for an instant, & perhaps you might watch that spot for a year & never see it again. Every slight change of the ceaselessly changing atmosphere washes the mountain with new distributions of light & shade, new dreams of enchanting color. On a bright day all the great mass is a glory of all shades of green, & hazy blacks & blues, with vagrant films of white clouds creeping about it & mottling it with their shadows; & as evening approaches it is drowned in soft & rich & luminous mists, blue & purple & golden–& presently the sun is gone & the mountain’s vast silhouette, looms stupendous in the sky, its base fused with the night, its jagged summit backed strong & black against a sunset explosion of rich dyes, a conflagration of flaming splendors.

….

There is a hard smooth road at the lake edge all around—made for carriages, but all the world bikes now. ———

In the store where I bought the cigars there is a little of everything, including anvils, Bibles, sheet music, salt mackerel, & millinery. Like New England. Two buxom girls there.

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We have to have a row-boat—another expense. And bathing-suits [NB 42 TS 11-13].