Swiss hotel-proprietors are said to be gloomy, and not, it
must be admitted, without some reason. Last year the weather was bad, and many guests cut their stay short and went home. This year there has been little wrong with the weather, but a good deal wrong with the guests. So far as they were native they went abroad—to Italy or France, where their own currency bought piles of lire or francs—and so far as they were British they came with too little money. A good many Belgians came, with large cars and fairly full purses, but they were no more than a mitigation. The August rush, moreover, has been heartbreaking. Hotels that were half- empty in June and much of July have had to refuse applications by the hundred for August. It is partly the British, with their notorious incapacity for imagining a holiday in any month but the eighth, but other nations seem to suffer from the same vagary. The consequences really are serious.
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