The waterfalls of Switzerland are among its crowning glories; and of these the falls of Schaffhausen are altogether the most imposing. The European, who has never worshiped at the foot of our own great cataract, looks down from the base of the Castle of Lauffen, after paying a franc for the privilege of getting to a standing-place; or he looks up from the opposite shore, where is reared the Castle of Worth, and he pronounces it magnificent. Mrs. Bull does not hesitate to declare it charming! Mr. Murray, in that everlasting Red book, without which no Englishman could do Europe—as this is the authority on which alone he ventures to admire any thing in art or nature, just as he swears only by the Times—Mr. Murray, in his never-to-be-dispensed-with Hand-book, informs him that this is “the finest cataract in Europe,” and, of course, in his opinion, it is the finest in the world. He leads the trembling traveller to the verge of the awful precipice, where, covered with spray, he may enjoy the full grandeur of this “hell of waters,” and then he adds, “It is only by this close proximity, amidst the tremendous roar and the uninterrupted rush of the river, that a true notion can be formed of the stupendous nature of this cataract!” The Rhine here leaps over the rocks into an abyss of fifty feet. The river is cloven in twain by a tower of rock in the centre of the stream, and the spray rises from its base in an eternal cloud. Picturesque and beautiful the falls certainly are, but grandeur can hardly be affirmed of them.

It was my first day of travel in Switzerland when I reached them—a warm day in the summer of last year. A month of hot weather in Dresden and Munich had been too much for the restoring powers of the waters of Baden-Baden, and it was like waking up in a new world of beauty, with a new soul to love it, to find myself in the midst of this Swiss scenery—the breezes of its snow hills and glaciers fanning me, and its peaks pointing skyward, where there are temples and palaces whose every dome is a sun and every pinnacle a star. But I could not be satisfied till, with the aid of two stout fellows, I made my way through the boiling waters nearly to the foot of the central tower, and there, in the toppling skiff which threatened to tip over on very gentle occasions, I looked up at the mass of waters tumbling from above. The rocks were partially covered with green shrubbery, and a scraggy tree stretched its frightful arms into the spray; but I was not disposed to climb, as some have done, to the top of the cliff, for the sake of enjoying the scene.

A curious old town is Schaffhausen, so named from the boat-houses, or skiff-houses, which were here erected, for the falls made this the great terminus of navigation on the Rhine. We had come by diligence from Basle, and after passing a night in Weber’s excellent hotel at the falls, we came on in the morning, and spent an hour or two looking at the ancient architecture of the town, whose buildings are adorned with such fanciful and extravagant carvings as would hardly be deemed ornamental in the Fifth Avenue.

A very small specimen of a steamer received us now, and bore us up against a strong current. The banks on either side were green with vineyards, now loaded with unripe fruit, and in the midst of the vines the dressers were at their work. On the sloping hillsides the neat cottages of the Swiss peasantry were scattered, making a picture of constant beauty through which we were passing. Among our passengers were a dozen German students, with their knapsacks on their backs, making a tour of Switzerland, the most of which they would perform on foot, gathering health and strength as they trudged on through the mountain passes, and studied the glacier theories on the spot.

It was noon when we arrived at Constance, on the lake of the same name, and a city to be forever associated with the trial and martyrdom of John Huss and Jerome of Prague—a city on which the curse of shedding innocent blood seems resting to this day. In the loft of a long building, now standing near the water’s edge, was gathered a Council, in the year of our Lord 1414, over which the Emperor Sigismund presided, and attended by some five hundred princes, cardinals, bishops, archbishops and professors, who deposed two popes and set up another, and crowned their four years’ labor of love by condemning to the flames those martyr men of God, whose names are this day fragrant in the churches of a land that was not known when Huss was burning. In the midst of a cabbage garden outside the gate, yet called the Huss Gate, we were led to the spot where he suffered; and returning, we called at the house in which he was lodged before he was brought to trial. But the streets of the city had grass growing in them; for of the forty thousand inhabitants who once filled these houses but seven thousand remain! Tenements are now tenantless that once were thronged with life. It was sad to wander by daylight through the streets without meeting a living being; and this was my experience here, and afterward in the island city of Rhodes. A chain stretched across the street sustained a lantern in the centre—a very convenient substitute for lamp-posts, if there are no carriages to pass, but a very awkward arrangement for a city infested with omnibuses.

Another day and the diligence brought us to Zurich, on the lake of the same name—the most thriving town in Switzerland. Here the lion-hearted reformer, Zwingle—the soldier of the cross, who perished on the field of battle—preached in the Cathedral, and dwelt in a house which is still standing and known as his. Here Lavater, the physiognomist, had a home and found a grave, over which the flowers are blooming. His was a lovely and loving spirit. Switzerland, strange to say, has not given birth to poets, but she is the mother of many noble sons, and her scenery has inspired the souls of the sons of song from other climes, who have wandered here and meditated among her lakes and hills.

Coming into Zurich, as we descended into the vale that holds the city and the lake, I had been charmed with the view; and now at the close of the next day, we were led to the height of one of the old ramparts, to behold a Swiss sunset, and certified to be “one of the finest scenes in Switzerland.” The elevation, no longer needed for purposes of defence, has been tastefully transformed into a flower-garden. Enormous shade trees are crowning the summit, and on rude benches the romantically-disposed people, citizens and strangers, are seated. As we came to the top of the hill, the god of day was coming down from the midst of a dense cloud, like a mass of molten gold distilled into a transparent globe. His liquid face was trembling; but the world below sent back a smile of gladness as the king in his glory looked down upon it. The nearer summits seemed to catch the brightness first, and then in the distance others, invisible before, stood forth in their majesty, as if called into being by his quickening beams. At our feet was the lake, like a sea of glass. The spires of the city and the sloping hills were reflected from the mirror; and all over the country side, as far as the eye could reach, were thousands of white cottages and villas, the abode of wealth and peace and love—sweet Swiss homes, rejoicing in the sunshine as they send up their evening psalm of praise. It was a scene to make its impress on the memory, and to come up again and again in the far-off dreams of other lands and years.

To climb the Rigi, to spend the night on the top, to see the sun go down and get up in the morning, these are among the things to be done in a tour of Switzerland, and all these we set off to do, taking the steamer at Zurich and touching at Horgen, crossing over to Zug, and by steamer again to the little village of Arth, which lies at the foot of the hill we are to ascend. As we were approaching the shore, the reflection of the Rigi from the lake was so vivid and perfect that we could study the mountain in the water with as much satisfaction as a good-looking man contemplates his own person in a glass. Every particular cliff and crag, individual trees, and winding paths, and torrent beds, which we could see above, were defined with marvelous precision below. On landing, we dispatched a fleet mountain-boy ahead of us to engage beds at the house on the summit; for so many were with us on board the steamer, and so many more were doubtless climbing from the other side at the same time, that we were likely to have a bed on the floor unless we stole a march on our fellow-travellers. Most of them pushed upward from Arth, while we kept upon the plain for a mile or more to the village of Goldau, once the scene of a terrible catastrophe, the gloom of which still seems to be hanging over the ill-fated spot. The Rossberg Mountain is on the east of it, five thousand feet high, and in the year 1806 a mighty mass of it, some three miles long and a thousand feet thick, came sliding down into the valley, burying four hundred and fifty human beings in one untimely, dreadful grave. Travellers, like ourselves, who were making their way among these romantic regions, were suddenly overwhelmed in the deluge of earth and stones, and the places of their burial are unknown to this day. This event happened fifty years ago; but the broad, bare strip on the mountain side, which no verdure has since clad, is an ever-present record of the awful fall; and the great rocks that are lying on the opposite side of the valley, and away up the Rigi, are present witnesses of the messengers of death that came down in their wrath on that memorable day. The village church was then buried with the people who had been wont to frequent its courts, and nothing of it was ever found but the bell, which was carried a mile or more and now hangs in the steeple of another little temple filled with memorials of the ancient calamity.

Here we began the ascent of the Rigi. Some on horses, some on mules, more on foot, two or three ladies in sedan chairs, each borne by four stout men—a very lazy way of getting up hill, where health as well as pleasure is sought in travel; but every one choosing his own mode of ascent, and none having wings, we set off, as motley a party of mountain-climbers as ever undertook to scale a fortress. Four hours’ steady travel, pausing only to look in occasionally at the chapels in which the Catholic pilgrims perform their prayers as they ascend to the church of “Mary in the Snow,” which is about half-way up, brought us to the top where as yet the sun was half an hour high. And now, for the first time, did we know that we were in Switzerland. Not because we are on a very lofty mountain top—for the Rigi is not quite six thousand feet high—but we are on a mountain which stands so isolated that it affords us a better view than any other point, however elevated, of the mountains, the lakes, valleys, and villages, that make this land so peculiar for its beauty and grandeur. On the west, where we gazed with the deepest emotion as soon as we planted our feet on the summit, we saw the hoary Mount Pilatus, and at its base the Lake Lucerne, the most romantic of the Swiss lakes, and not exceeded by the scenery of any lake in the world. The city of Lucerne sends up its towers and battlements, and the whole canton of that name is spread out, with the River Reuss flowing over its bosom. At our feet, nestling under the Rigi and on the borders of the lake, is the village of Kussnacht, and the chapel of William Tell, marking the spot where the intrepid patriot pierced the tyrant’s heart with his unerring arrow. And now the descending sun is pouring a flood of golden glory over all this broad expanse of lake and forest, plain and towering hills, whose peaks are touching the blue skies, gilded with last rays of declining day. Far southward we look away upon the mountains of Unterwalden, of Berne, and of Uri, whose snow-clad summits and blue glaciers are in full view, the beautiful Jungfrau rising, queen-like, in the midst of the magnificent group of sisters in white raiment. The eastern horizon is supported by the snowy peaks of the Sentis, the Glarnisch, and the Dodi; and the two Mitres start up from the midst of that region where Tell and his compatriots conspired to give liberty to their native land. All around us are lakes, so strangely nestled among the mountains that they seem to be innumerable, peeping from behind the hills and forests. And now the sound of the village bells, and the Alpine horn, and the evening psalm, comes stealing up the rugged sides of the Rigi, and we are assured that, in this world of ice, and snow, and eternal rocks, there are human hearts all warm and musical with the love of Him whose is the strength of the hills.

We had a short night’s sleep, for what with a late supper and a crowd of people who had no beds, our rest was broken; and just as the dawn began, a monster, with a long wooden horn, marched through the halls, startling the sleepers with its blast, and forbidding sleep to come again. We had been warned over night that, at this signal, we must wrap up and run if we would see the sun rise; and as a posted notice in French forbade the use of the bed-blankets, we hurried on our clothes, and in a few moments stood, with a hundred others, like the Persian fire-worshippers, gazing eastward to catch the first glimpse of the coming king! Not long had we to wait. Another blast of the wooden trump gave notice of his approach, and presently a coal of fire seemed to be glowing in the crown of the mountain directly in front of us. It grew till the whole peak was ruddy with the glow, and then the great globe rose and rested on the summit! From this, as from a fount of light new-created and rejoicing in the first morning of its being, the streams of glory were poured out upon the world below and around us. Peak after peak, and long mountain ranges and ridges, domes and sky-piercing needles, and fields of fresh snow, and forests of living green, began to smile in the sunlight. In the space of a brief half hour the world was lighted up for the business of another day, and when we had had a cup of wretched coffee and a bit of sour bread, we “marched down again.”

The steamer from Lucerne, on its daily trip from that city, touches at Weggis, where we awaited its coming, and were soon in the midst of the most romantic scenery in Europe. From the water’s edge the mountains rise perpendicularly. Broken into ridges, clothed with green forests or smooth pastures, and now and then sheltering a hamlet in the openings, the mountains stand around this lake with a majesty too impressive for words. We have come into the heart of a land of heroes. The waters of this lake are like the life-blood of martyrs. This little village of Gersau, on a sloping hillside, shut out from the rest of the world by these mountain ramparts, was an independent democracy of four hundred years, though its domains were only three miles by two! Here, at Brunnen, are painted, on the outer walls of a building on the waterside, the effigies of the three great men who, with William Tell, achieved the independence of Switzerland in 1815. Across the lake, away up among the ledges of the rocks, there lies a little plain, an oasis in the wilderness, where, in the dead of night, the three confederates met and laid their plans for the deliverance of their country from the yoke of a foreign oppressor. That spot is Grutli. It is a holy place, for liberty was there conceived, and every patriot, from whatever land he comes, is thrilled when his eye looks on it. Yet not so sacred is Grutli as the land upon the opposite side of the lake, where the steamer slackens its speed as we are passing a little chapel that is built upon the margin of the lake. This chapel marks the spot where William Tell escaped from the boat in which he was a prisoner on his way to Gessler’s prison at Kussnacht. It does savage violence to one’s better feelings to be told that no such man as Tell was ever living in this land we are now exploring. He has been our ideal of a patriot chieftain from childhood, and we are not to be cheated out of him without a struggle. Skeptical critics may tell us, as they do, that Tell is a myth; but we have history for our faith to lean upon, and tradition tells us that this chapel was built in 1388, thirty-one years after the hero’s death, and in presence of one hundred and fourteen persons who had known him when he was living. Such is our faith, and as we are passing by the chapel, to which, even unto this day, the Swiss make an annual pilgrimage and have a solemn mass performed within its narrow walls, and a sermon preached, we will tell the story of Tell.

When the year 1300 was coming in, Albert of Austria was ruling with a rod of iron over the dwellers in these mountains. He sent magistrates among them who exacted heavy taxes which they were unable to pay, and imposed arbitrary and cruel punishments upon them on slight occasions. Arnold, a peasant of Uterwalden, was condemned for some insignificant offence to give up a yoke of fine oxen, and the servant of the bailiff seized them while Arnold was plowing with them, and said, as he drove them off, “Peasants may draw the plow themselves.” Arnold smote the servant, breaking two of his fingers, and fled. The tyrant seized the father of Arnold and put out both his eyes! Such cruelties became too many and too grievous to be borne. Even the women—brave souls!—refused to submit, and the wife of Werner Stauffacher said to her husband: “Shall foreigners be masters of this soil and of our property? What are the men of the mountain good for? Must we mothers nurse beggars at our breasts, and bring up our daughters to be maid-servants to foreign lords? We must put an end to this!” Her husband was roused, and went to Arnold, whose father’s eyes had been put out, and Walter Furst. These three held their meetings for counsel at Grutli. Afterward each of them brought ten men there, who bound themselves by a great oath to deliver their land from the oppressor. This oath was taken in the night of November 17, 1307. Not long afterward the bailiff, Herman Gessler, when he saw the people more restless and bold, resolved to humble them. He placed the ducal hat of Austria upon a pole, and ordered every one who passed by to bow down in reverence before it. William Tell, one of the men who had taken the oath at Grutli, held his head proudly erect as he passed, and when warned of the danger of such disobedience stoutly refused to bow. He was seized and carried before the bailiff, who was told that Tell, the most skillful archer of Uri, had refused to pay homage to the emblem of Austrian power. Enraged at Tell’s audacity, Gessler exclaimed,

“Presumptuous archer, I will humble thee by the display of thine own skill. I will put an apple on the top of the head of thy little son; shoot it off, and you shall be pardoned!”

In vain did the wretched father plead against such cruelty. He could pierce the eagle on the wing, and bring down the fleet chamois from the lofty rocks, but his arm would tremble and his eyesight fail him when he took aim at the head of his noble boy. But his remonstrances were all in vain. The boy was bound to a tree, and the apple set upon his head. The strong-hearted father took leave of his son, scarce hoping that he could spare him, and rather believing that his arrow would in another moment be rushing through his brain. With a prayer for help from Him who holds the stars in his hand, and without whose providence not a sparrow falls, the wretched father drew his bow. The unerring arrow pierced the apple, and the child was saved. Another arrow fell from underneath the garment of the archer as the shout of the people proclaimed the father’s triumph.

“What means this?” demanded the tyrant.

“To pierce thy heart,” replied Tell, “if the other had slain my son!”

Gessler ordered the man to be seized and bound, and hurried off to the dungeon he had built at Kussnacht. Fearing to trust the guards with their prisoner—for he knew not how far the spirit of rebellion might have spread—Gessler embarked in the boat with them, and hastened off lest the people should rise to the rescue of their countryman. The lake was subject then, as it is now, to sudden and fearful tempests. The wind rose and swept the waves over the boat, defying the skill of the boatmen, and threatening their speedy destruction. Tell was known for his skill with a boat as well as with a bow. Tyrants are always cowards, and when the tyrant saw that his own men were not able to manage the craft, he ordered Tell’s bonds to be removed that he might take the helm in his hand. Steering the boat as near to the projecting rock of Axenberg as she could run, he suddenly leaped from it to the ledge, and the force of his leap sent the boat backward upon the lake. The prisoner was free. Pursuit was hopeless. He was at home among the mountains. Every path was familiar to him. But vengeance would be taken on those dearer than his own life. He resolved to preserve them by the death of the monster who had sought to make him slay his own son. With the speed of the chamois he sped his way across the mountains to the very place where he was to have been carried in chains, and there awaited the coming of Gessler. The tyrant came but to die. The arrow of the patriot drank his heart’s blood. Then the inhabitants of the mountain fastnesses flew to arms. The minions of Austria were seized, and with a wonderful forbearance were not slain, but sent out of the country under an oath never to return. The King Albert came to subdue the rebels. On his way he was murdered by his nephew and a band of conspirators, whom he had thought his friends. He expired at the wayside, his head being supported by a peasant woman who found him lying in his blood. The children of the murdered man and his widow, and Agnes the Queen of Hungary, took terrible vengeance on the murderers, and, confounding the innocent with the guilty, shed blood like water. Agnes was a woman-fiend. As the blood of sixty-three guiltless knights was flowing at her feet, she said: “See, now I am bathing in May-dew!” One of the most distinguished of the enemies of the King, the Knight Rudolf, was, at her orders, broken on the rack, and while yet living was exposed to the birds of prey. While dying, he consoled his faithful wife, who alone knelt near him, and had in vain prostrated herself in the dust at the feet of Agnes, imploring her husband’s pardon. But the war of oppression went on. An army marched into Switzerland, and to the many thousands of their invaders the men of Grutli could oppose only thirteen thousand. But they were all true men, and at Morgarten, on a rosy morning in 1315, they met the enemy and routed them utterly, after such deeds of valor as history scarcely elsewhere has recorded. This gave freedom to Switzerland. Of that struggle the first blow was struck by William Tell when he smote Gessler to the earth.

At the head of the Lake of Lucerne, and a few miles above the chapel of Tell, is the village of Fluelen, at which we rest only long enough to get away, for the low grounds, where the River Reuss comes down into the lake, breeds pestilence, and the inhabitants give proofs of the unhealthiness of the place by the number of cretins and goitred cases that are found among them. Two miles beyond is the old town of Altorf. Lapped in the midst of rugged mountains, which shut down closely on every side, it is secluded from the world that is familiar with its name. Here, on this village green, in front of the old tower, a fountain, surmounted by a statue, marks the spot where William Tell shot the apple from the head of his son. The tree on which the ducal hat was hung by Gessler, and the same to which the boy was bound, is said to have remained there three hundred years after the event. The tower dates back of that time, as records still in existence prove it to be more than five hundred and fifty years old. To this day the hunters of Uri come down to Altorf to try their skill with the rifle, which has now taken the place of the bow and arrow.

A few miles further on we came to the River Reuss, in which William Tell was drowned while attempting to save the life of a boy. There was something sublime in the thought that a man whose name is now identified with the patriots and heroes of the world should finally lose his life in the performance of a deed that requires more of the self-sacrificing spirit than to scale the walls of a fortress and perish in the midst of a nation’s praise.

The men of this region are spoken of as the finest race in Switzerland. We had no reason to think them remarkable; but the women, who were making hay in the meadows while the men were off hunting, were certainly very good-looking for women who work in the fields in all weathers, braving the storms of rain and snow, tending the sheep and cattle on the hillsides, and carrying the hay on their backs to the barns.

As we pressed our way up the great Saint Gothard road, frowning precipices rise a thousand feet high, black, jagged rocks, almost bare of vegetation, shutting out the sunlight, and making a solitude fearful and solemn, its silence rarely disturbed but by the passing traveller and the ceaseless dashing of the river, which, instead of flowing, tumbles from ledge to ledge. In the spring of the year the avalanches make the passage still more fearful.

Twenty or thirty thousand persons travel over this pass every year; and to keep the current in this direction, the cantons of Uri and Tessin built this splendid carriage-path, as smooth as a floor, and so firm in its substructures as to resist the violence of the storms and the swollen torrents that so often rush frightfully down these gorges. Twice was the work swept away before this road was completed, which, it is believed, will stand while the mountains stand. So rapid is the ascent, that the road often doubles upon itself, and we are going half the time backward on our route. Sometimes the road is hewn out of the solid rock in the side of the precipice, which hangs over it as a roof, and again it is carried over the roaring stream that is boiling in a gulf four hundred feet below. Toiling up the gorge, with the savage wildness of the scenery becoming every moment more savage still, we reach the Devil’s Bridge. More than five hundred years ago, an old abbot of Einsiedeln built a bridge over an awful chasm here; but such is the fury of the descending stream, the whole mass of waters being beaten into foam among the rocks that lift their heads through the cataracts—such is the horrid ruggedness of the surrounding scenery, and so unlikely does it appear that human power could ever have reared a bridge over such a fearful chasm, it has been called, from time immemorial, the Devil’s Bridge. A Christian traveller would much prefer to ascribe its origin to a better source; for whatever miracle it required, we might refer it to the skill and goodness of Him who hung the earth upon nothing, and holds the stars in his hand. We were quite cold when we reached the bridge, and, quitting the carriage, walked over it to study its structure, and enjoy the grandeur of a scene that has hardly an equal even in this land of the sublime and terrible. At this spot the River Reuss makes a tremendous plunge at the very moment that it bends nearly in a semicircle, and a world of rocks has been hurled and heaped in the midst of the torrent, to increase the rage and roar of the waters, arrested for a moment only to gather strength for a more terrific rush into the abysses below. We approach the parapet, and look calmly over, and there, far below us, is another bridge, which, becoming useless by age and the violence of the elements, was superseded by this new and costly structure.

We crossed the bridge and soon entered the long Gallery of Uri—a tunnel cut through the solid rock—a hard but the only passage, as the torrent usurps the whole of the gorge, and the precipice above admits no possible path overhead. A hundred and fifty years ago this hole was bored, and before that time the only passage was made on a shelf supported by chains let down from above, on which a single traveller could creep, if he had the nerve, in the midst of the roar and the spray of the torrent in the yawning gulf below him. To add to the gloom and terror of the scene about us, a storm, with thunder and lightning broke upon us as we emerged from this den, and right speedily set in while as yet we had no shelter. We had come into an upper valley, a vale five thousand feet above the level of the sea, where no corn grows, though the land flows with milk and honey. The cows and goats find pasture at the foot of the glaciers, and the bees, who find flowers even in these realms of eternal snow, make their nests in the stunted trees and the holes in the rocks. At Andermatt, a village among the mountains, we come upon an inn whose many lighted windows invited us to seek refuge from the increasing storm, and we entered a room already thronged with travellers who had reached it before us, many of them coming down, and they were now rejoicing over a smoking supper. They made us welcome, and in the good cheer we soon forgot the fatigues and the perils of the most exciting and exhausting day we had had in Switzerland.

“Blessed be he who first invented sleep,” the weary traveller says, with Sancho, whenever night comes, and wherever, if he is so happy as to have a place wherein and on to lay his head. Sleep, that will not come for wooing to him who wastes his hours in idleness at home, now folds her soft arms lovingly about him, kisses his eyelids, whispers gentle memories in his soul, and dreams of the loved and the distant are his as the swift night-hours steal away. The nights are not long enough; for when the first nap is past the sun of another day is struggling to get over the hill-top and look down into the vale of Andermatt!

We might pursue this St. Gothard highway over into Italy, but we have not yet seen Switzerland.—Hitherto we have been traversing only the great roads of travel. Now we will strike off into the regions where wheel carriages have never yet been seen. The Furca Pass leads off from the St. Gothard road, and with a guide to pilot us, we struck into a narrow defile. Away above us the blue glacier of St. Anne was shining in the morning sun, and now we are at the foot of a beautiful waterfall that leaps from its bosom into the vale below. Here are the remains of an awful avalanche of rocks and earth that came down a few years since, on a little hamlet clustering on the hillside. The inhabitants fled as they heard it coming, but a maiden, tending a babe, refused to leave her precious charge, and could not fly with it as rapidly as the rest. She perished with it in her arms. Soon we came to a mountain stream which crossed our path, and the bridge had been swept away by an avalanche only the very night before. There were no signs of danger now, and we could scarcely believe the stories that were told us of the sudden destruction wrought by these thunderbolts of snow, and ice, and earth, which are the terror of these regions. The village we slept in last night is protected by a forest of trees so arranged as to receive and ward off the slides; but they come at times with such force as to cut off the trees, and bury everything in undistinguished ruin.

This pedestrianism is very well to boast of at home, and for those who are used to it and fond of it, it may be a very agreeable mode of travel; I confess I was tired of it the first day, and took to the horse as decidedly a better, as it certainly is an easier method of transit. It was just about as much as I could do to walk, and think of the number of miles we had gone, and had yet to go, with scarcely any spirit to enjoy the romance of the scenery, the glaciers and waterfalls, the precipices and snowy summits that were around me; and groaning all the while with the burden of locomotion. It was another thing altogether to sit on a horse, and folding one’s arms, to look upward and around rejoicing in the wonders of God’s world, and breathing in with the mountain air, the rich inspirations of the scene.

We are now so far up in the world that the snow, though the month of August is closing, is lying by the side of the pathway, while the wild flowers, in bright and beautiful colors, are blooming in the sun, and close to the edges of these chilling banks. On our right hand the Galenstoch glacier lies among the peaks of naked rock that, like the battlements of some thunder-riven castle, shoot upward eleven thousand feet into the clear blue sky. We are among the ice-palaces of the earth. I hug my great coat closely, as the cold winds from these eternal icebergs search me, and in a few minutes reached the inn at the summit of the Furca Pass. Snow-clad summits of distant mountains glistened in the noonday sun, and blue glaciers wound along and down the gorges, and so far above the valleys were we now that it seemed like a world without inhabitants, desolate, cold, and majestic, in its solitude and icy splendor.

The descent was too rapid for safe riding, and, giving the horse to the guide, who would lead him around, I leaped down the steep declivity, and soon found myself in a lovely vale. Turning suddenly around a promontory, a scene of such grandeur and beauty burst upon our sight as we had not yet encountered, even in this land of wonders. An ocean lashed into ridges and covered with foam, then suddenly congealed, would not be the spectacle! Freeze the cataract of Niagara and the rapids above it, and let them rise a thousand feet into the air; congeal the clouds of spray, the falling jewelry; pile up pyramids and minarets, and columns, and battlements of ice, and then, at each side of this magnificent scene, set a tall mountain, with green pasturage on its sides, and its head crowned with everlasting snow, and you have some faint image of the Glacier of the Rhone! Travellers have called it the Frozen Ocean of Switzerland. But it is more than this. And yet out of its bosom, its cold but melting heart, the River Rhone is flowing. This is its source. The daring adventurer may follow it up, beneath the blue arches and between the polished walls, till he finds himself far away in these caverns of ice, where no living thing abides. And here he learns the great design of a beneficent Creator in forming these glaciers. The snows of winter are here stored up, and, instead of being suddenly melted in the spring, and then sent down in torrents to devastate the lands through which the overwhelming currents would be borne, they are melted by degrees, and led by channels through these mountain passes into the river beds that water all the countries of Europe! For this great purpose Switzerland was built! It has been lightly said that this Swiss country looks as if it had been the leavings of the world when creation was finished, and the refuse material that could not be conveniently worked in had been thrown in dire confusion, heaps on heaps, into this wilderness of jagged rocks, and shapeless mountains, and disordered ranges of hill and vale—impracticable for man or beast—a rude, wild land, doomed to perpetual poverty, and existing only to be an object of curiosity to the traveller. But we find it to be the great fountain of living waters, pouring its inexhaustible streams into the wide and many lands below, carrying fertility and beauty over millions of acres, and food and gladness to countless homes.

A hard hill to climb was the Grimsel. Sometimes I rode, but more frequently I was content to toil upward on my own feet, without taxing the jaded horse with my weight to be added to his own. But when we reached the summit, and overtook other parties who were before us, and were overtaken by yet others coming up behind, we formed a picturesque procession of some forty or fifty pilgrims, who wound slowly along the banks of the Dead Sea—a lake that lies away up among these frozen heights, and derives its name from the fact that it was once the grave of a multitude of soldiers who perished in the fight in these mountain fastnesses.

The vale of the Grimsel is beneath us, and just before the sun sets we reach the Hospice, and eagerly ask for lodgings. On the borders of a little lake, in the bottom of a narrow valley, surrounded by almost perpendicular rocks, stands this solitary house, in former years inhabited by friendly monks who made it their pious care to entertain the traveller and furnish free hospitality to the poor. Now it is a hotel, and a very poor one at that, where you may get a supper, and a bed, and a large bill in the morning. This is a dreary spot now, and in the winter more fearful it must be.

In the morning we found the path that led us out of the valley to the Glaciers of the Aar. The mountain of earth, rocks, ice and snow that we encountered put to flight all ideas we had formed of a glacier. We seemed to have come to a vast heap of sand, or to the debris brought down by an avalanche, but from the base of it a torrent was rushing of a dirty milky hue, and out of its front we could see rocks of blue ice projecting. Now and then a mass of earth or a huge boulder would be hurled along down the precipice.

And this mighty mass of ice, decaying at the front and pressed down from above, is slowly moving onward at the rate of some twelve inches a day. If a stream of water running across it cuts a wide seam, so that the mass is suddenly brought down, the shock will throw up the ice in ridges, and in various fantastic shapes, as if some great explosion had upheaved the frozen ocean, and the fragments had come down in wild confusion, like the ruins of a crystal city. Then the sun gradually melts the towers, and they assume shapes of dazzling beauty, palaces of glass, silver domes, and shining battlements—making us to wonder that so much beauty and magnificence are seemingly wasted in these dreary solitudes.

Nestled charmingly among the hills is the sweet village of Interlaken. The plain which it adorns stretches from Lake Thun to Lake Brienz, and the quiet retreat it furnishes is improved by hundreds of English people, who make it a summer residence. It combines two advantages, very rarely blended in this world—it is cheap and genteel. A large number of neat boarding-houses, some of them aspiring to the rank of first-class hotels, are scattered along the main street of the village; and at the Hotel des Alpen, the largest establishment and admirably kept, the traveller may find good rooms and board for a dollar a day, and at even less than that if he is disposed to be very economical. We had crossed the Wengern Alp and passed the vale of Grindelwald; had seen an avalanche come down from the side of the Jungfrau, and been amused with the little cascade called the Staubach, about which poets and printers have gone into ecstasies; and we were glad to find so quiet, beautiful, and civilized a spot in which to sit down for a few days and rest.

While we were at Interlaken we made a beautiful excursion on Lake Brienz to the Giesbach Fall. It has some peculiarities that claim for it the very first rank among the falls of Switzerland. See the little stream that issues as from a cleft in the rock, nearly a thousand feet above the waters of the lake. Then among the dark evergreens the white flood comes swelling and plunging into secret abysses where the eye can not search its hidings, but it rises again with a widened torrent, and now spreads a broad bosom of waters over a mighty precipice; and here a bridge has been thrown across in front of the falls, and a gallery cut away behind it, so that it may be circumvented by the visitor who is provided with an overcoat of India rubber, or is willing to take a thorough sponging for sake of the submarine excursion. When I had completed the circuit, a lady was regretting that she could not venture on the tour, but her scruples were instantly removed when I offered her my water-proof, and in a few minutes she returned “charmed” with her trip. Once more the swollen mass of waters plunges over the rocks and shoots out into the lake, in one of the most romantic and beautiful regions that is to be found in this wildly beautiful land.

I pass over the experiences of a few days’ travel, and come suddenly to the summit of the Col de Balm.

Mont Blanc is in sight! Not a faint and doubtful view of a peak among a hundred peaks, but the monarch of the Alps stands there—a king in his glory, revealed from his summit to the base. A cloud is gathered like a halo on his head; but it rises and vanishes as we look upon it with silent admiration and awe. Around him are the Aiguilles or Needles, bare pinnacles of rock stretching up like guards into the heavens, and between are the glaciers—reflecting now the rays of the noonday sun, and among them the Mer de Glace—winding along down the gorges, and resting their cold feet in the vale below.

UNDER THE GEISBACH FALLS.