Swiss allmends, and a walk to see them

by F. Barham Zincke

CHAPTER IV.

BUOCHS—GERSAU—THE BAY OF URI—ALTORF—AM STAG—WASEN—GÖSCHENEN—SCHÖLLINEN—THE DEVIL’S BRIDGE—THE URSEREN THAL—ST. GOTHARD.

Oh! how I love with thee to walk,

And listen to thy whispered talk!—Thomson.

As you leave the bay of Buochs you find that the mountains on all sides show well from the lake. Behind is Obburgen, at which we have just now been looking. On your immediate right is Buochserhorn. Beyond it is Seelisberg, though not yet itself visible, but only the way to it by Beckenried, on the east face of which is the Sonnenberg Hotel, a head-quarters for much that is good and interesting. On your left is the Rigiberg. Before you, in sight of which you soon come, is Brunnen, the port of Schwyz, which is seen three miles back, at the foot of the rocky and precipitous Mythen. A fair expanse, how fair! of bluest crystal, set in a glorious frame of multiform mountains, superficially more or less subdued by long ages of human industry: this, however, being possible only to such a degree as to diversify, and enrich the interest of the scene. In itself a glorious scene! but there is, besides, all about it the glamour of the memory that it was the cradle of Swiss liberty.

Along the beach at Buochs I had seen several peasant women, turning over in the bright sun to dry, as if it were so much wet hay, the roots and fragments of wood they had collected from what the storm of Friday night last had swept from the mountains into the Engelberg Aa, which had brought them down to the lake. This was to be added to their store of winter fuel. Fuel has now become very dear in Switzerland, not only from its participation in the general rise of prices—that affects everything—but also from an exceptional cause. The recent increase of population has led to a corresponding increase of cultivation; and this has been effected chiefly at the expense of the forests, which are here the only source of fuel. While, therefore, the number of consumers has increased the supply of fuel has diminished. On reaching Gersau I came on further evidence of the violence of that great storm.

But first a word about Gersau itself. Its history is interesting. Its territory is a little valley in the Rigiberg, every rood, tree, and house of which is taken in at a glance from the deck of the steamer. Its population may now number about 2,000 souls. The increase this implies is due to the advantages of its situation, and to the industry of its inhabitants, having enabled it to keep abreast of the general advance of the whole of this much-frequented region. To it belonged, for many centuries, during which its population was much less than at present, the distinction of being the smallest independent sovereign state in Europe. San Marino was four times as populous, and had a proportionately larger area. Its valley, which looks to the south, is about three miles in length. It rapidly descends from the top of the col to the lake. Its sides, east and west, with far more rapid descents, are about a mile, each, in width. The whole of this area is covered with little green prairies, studded thickly with fruit trees, and with dispersed houses. The toy capital is at the bottom of the valley, on the margin of the lake. All the water that flows from natural springs, or that, in heavy rains, runs off its surface, will evidently reach the lake by the central trunk-channel that passes through the little town. This flow of water is sufficient in ordinary times for the machinery of a silk-mill, which has been placed at its mouth.

Against such a storm as that of Friday no adequate precautions had, or probably could have, been taken. As the steamer approached the pier, we saw heaps of fresh rocky débris piled up on the beach, and observed that the main street had been cut up, and the materials of the road partly carried away, by the torrent that had swept over it. The silk-mill had been pretty well wrecked, and a great many houses, and much land injured. Some of the rocks brought down into the town were so large that they had to be broken up by blasting, before they could be removed. I, afterwards, saw in the Swiss papers that a collection was being made to assist those of the humbler classes here, who had suffered by the storm. I heard also that the new road that passes along the margin of the lake, from Brunnen to Flüelen, had, like that through the valley of Unterwalden, in some places been blocked with débris, and in some cut through. As to the poorer sufferers at Gersau, we may be sure that, whether aided from without, or not, by the proposed subscription, the long tradition of self-help is not yet forgotten in this little community; and that it will soon repair the damages it has sustained, as effectually as a hive of bees would an injury done to their comb.

As far as Brunnen, which is about four miles beyond Gersau, our steamer’s course had been due east. Her head was now put due south, down the bay of Uri, which is the southern branch of this tortuous lake. The character of the scene changed as rapidly and completely as the direction of our course. The mountains no longer, as at Buochs, Ennetburgen, Beckenried, Gersau, and Brunnen, gradually shelve down to the water, offering space for little communities, whose successful industry, and careful thrift, it is so pleasing to contemplate. Their sides are now mostly naked precipitous rock; in some places rising a thousand feet, sheer above the glassy water, which, in its turn, is another thousand feet deep. But even on these mountains, which like some old-fashioned fish, wear bones on the outside, and, going further, are bone to the heart, the industry of the people, which will take no denial, has set its mark. Wherever a little space could be found for grass, there its emerald green gems the rocks, just as some bright parasite might the ganoid fish. So, too, wherever a little wood, or even a tree, or two, could be made to grow, there it springs from the mountain side. On the left you face the line of the new road to Flüelen, with the Axenstein Hotel above it; on the right, two or three thousand feet above the water, you look up to the Sonnenberg Hotel. Above and beyond the latter, reaching on for some distance in front, a combination of snow-fields, and of naked peaks, appropriately completes a scene, which once beheld is for ever remembered.

In some places you see sections of rock, exposing strata that have been contorted into zigzags. This convolution of the rock, the mountain high precipices, and the depth of the water, indicate how great were the forces that have been at work here, and with what mighty throes they worked, or through how long a range of ages.

I reached Altorf, in time for the 12 o’clock dinner, at the Golden Key. There were twenty-five people at table, among whom I was, I believe, the only Englishman; the rest being Germans, or Swiss. English people, however, do not like these hours; but I had breakfasted early. Altorf, though the capital, is not itself a Commune, but belongs to the quasi-Commune of Attinghausen, as Am Stag does to that of Silenen. I use the word quasi-Commune, because politically all the Communes of northern Uri, speaking roundly, and subject to some qualifications and explanations, form one body; each being a distinct body, again with qualifications and exceptions, only for economical purposes. This is the case also with the Communes of Southern Uri, or the Urseren Thal.

After dinner I walked over the whole capital in a vain search for a shop, in which I might get some statistical account of the Canton. Not one was to be found in which printed matter of any, even the humblest, kind was sold. Ammer laughed at my simplicity. ‘In Uri people do not spend money on books. But if I were to go to the Hotel de Ville, where the authorities were then holding a sitting, I might find the Archivar, or some such officer, who possibly might be of use to me.’ I acted on the suggestion; and brought away with me an abstract of the last census of Uri. But I found that in the capital of Uri printed matter, in accordance with the general rule in all matters, was dear in proportion to its scarcity. For a few figures—for the population of the Canton is only 16,095—printed on a small square of coarse spungy paper, not good enough to wrap up grocery in, I had to pay a franc. But I hold that the franc was not ill spent, as I found that, under the head of ‘Confession,’ of the above given number 16,025 were ‘Catholics;’ 60 ‘Protestants,’ 1 (with commendable precision) of ‘other Christian professions,’ and 3 ‘Israelites, and of other non-Christian professions.’ Considering the relation of Israelitism to Christianity it is not quite right to class it with all kinds of heathenism; though perhaps this heading may be defended by our own ‘Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics.’ But what a Priest’s Paradise must Uri be! Only 4 per thousand, not nearly a half per cent., of heretics and misbelievers of all kinds; and then not a book to be bought! How long will it be before these one-minded and unreading folk reach the debate of the old question What is truth; and come to understand that demonstrable fact is an alternative answer to the thimblerig of authority?

In the afternoon, having left my malle in charge of the landlord of the Golden Key, I went on to Am Stag. So far there is bottom land in the valley; broad at Altorf, and narrowing all the way to Am Stag, where it ends. The bounding ranges are always interesting, as seen from the road, which runs pretty straight, and pretty much on a level, for the intervening nine miles, among meadows, in which numerous fruit trees, as elsewhere in Switzerland, appear to be of little, or no, detriment to the grass.

Am Stag was reached at 6 o’clock. This gave time enough to look at the village, and its entourage. It is a small place created by the traffic through the valley, to which it is a kind of half-way house, where voituriers bait their horses, and the diligences take fresh teams. The mountains close in above and below it, forming a deep hollow of about a third of a mile in diameter. The environing mountains look unusually hard and pitiless; in part of naked rock, in part clothed with stunted woods. On the west side of the village the Reuss races by, being joined in the village by the stream of the Maderaner Thal, of about the same volume, and quite as noisy. These, with the breadth of sky above, are all the objects in nature the peasants of Am Stag have to contemplate. And in winter everything is buried in snow. And, then, the capital, for the dissemination of ideas, is Altorf. The time must be still distant when the coming bookseller of Altorf will have a customer from Am Stag.

From several conversations I had, during this excursion, with young women in these Catholic cantons, I came to think that they are not so keen and hard as, more gentle, artless, and pleasant to talk with than—to make the comparison as personal as possible—they would have been, had they been brought up under a different system. They seemed to wish to be friendly, and not to be afraid of being so; and not to have des arrière-pensées, nor to suspect other people of having them; and to be taking life as it came, as if it were not they who were responsible for what it brought. This may be a mere fancy of my own; but, because I think it something more, I set it down here.

What is the intellectual life of the peasants of Am Stag? If even in a broad country-side, where a bookseller can live, and the world is not quite unknown, the one subject of conversation that interests all, and alone never flags, is one’s neighbours, and their affairs; and if, even in its larger atmosphere, petty jealousies and heart-burnings abound; and often grow, for the soil and atmosphere have some qualities that stimulate such growths, to not insignificant dimensions, from beginnings no bigger than, and as unsubstantial as, the midge’s wing; what, in these matters, must be the state of this little community, when imprisoned for the winter in its mountain cage? How A. manages, now that he no longer has a cow; or how B. managed to get one, are fruitful topics, that will not be dropped till next summer. That C. has, or is supposed to have, beaten her cat, that D.’s hen is reported to have laid an egg, will not be without interest, though the former particular, however long and sedulously nursed, may never get beyond the stage of inference. This, however, will not unfit it for many improvements; which, perhaps, the intervention of the Priest, in his capacity of moral policeman, may sometimes prevent being carried too far. For, though his authority may not now be always quite unquestioned, he still wields a machinery which, under the circumstances of the valley, leaves him master of the situation.

As to A.’s not having any longer a cow to send up to the common pasture—poor fellow! he does not see exactly how this came about. But it is not inexplicable. He is a peasant burger, with a pedigree as old as that of the Hapsburgs. His ancestors, each in his day, to a time back beyond history, had a cow or two to send in the summer. He does what he can; and yet, though still a co-proprietor of the old pastures, just as his ancestors were, he has no cow to send. That is the puzzle. His voice is as potent as that of any of his fellow-burgers in the management of those pastures. He is as much co-owner of them as they. Nothing can divest him of his right in their common use. It is a personal right inherent in his blood. But now he can turn it to no account. He looks on as the rich Innkeeper sends up his dozen, or score of cows, while he has himself none to send. As the herd is driven by, through the village, with bells tinkling, and joyous at the prospect of returning at last to the fresh, thymy, mountain herbage, he looks on in silence, with his mouth open, as if his hopes, and his wits, too, were departing from him, through the passage he is providing for their exit.

He cannot understand how things have come to be as they are. He worked hard all the summer. But, then, he worked for wages: and that is the key to the puzzle. The valley is now advancing into the condition in which, on account of the traffic and business it supports, there will be some who will have to employ others; and many, as population is increasing, who will have no means of living except that of being employed by others. Those who employ others will have cows, some of them many, to send up to the common pastures; some very many more than any had in old times. Of those who are employed by others, many, having necessarily been otherwise occupied, were not able in the foregoing summer to collect food for keeping a cow through last winter, and so this summer, and among these is our poor friend, have not one cow to add to the herd, that is now being collected from the village for their three months’ sojourn on the mountain pastures. These he can no longer turn to account. And he will not emigrate to a new world, where there are openings for his industry and thrift to make him a richer man than anyone in his Canton will ever be; nor will he even leave his Canton for another. And all this for the sake of his long line of burger ancestors, and for the sake of his common rights in the land, which—as far as pasturage go—are of no manner of use to him. It is the sentiments, so lovely and so human, of home, of kindred, of the accustomed locality, of country, that have fastened themselves to, and fed on, the now valueless corporeal hereditament, that bind him to the spot with a chain he has no power to break. The hopes and chances of the distant world do not allure him. For them he will not sell the inheritance, nor leave the graves, of his Fathers.

And as it is, here, with the common pasturage, so is it in some degree with the produce of the common forests. In conformity with immemorial usage, the fuel, and timber for repair of houses, are distributed in proportion to the size of the house. A large house, in which many fires are needed, and which will require more timber for repairs, will receive its proportion. So will also the poor man’s humble tenement. To him this will perhaps give for fuel one klafter, which will not be enough for his wants. But to his rich neighbour, who could well afford to pay for his fuel, it will give four or five klafters. A klafter of wood is a solid measure, six feet long, wide, and high, and three feet deep. This method of distribution, which worked fairly enough under the old condition of things, when none were rich, and none were poor, works unfairly now, when there are opportunities, of which some will be able to avail themselves, for getting rich. A man may now prosper at home in ways unknown formerly; or he may go out into the world, and make several thousand francs, as my Am Stag informant had done, and then come back, and resume his rights, none of which absence forfeits; and he will be rich, and will, therefore, build, and live in, a large house; and this will entitle him to a large proportion of the common fuel and timber. There will, therefore, be so much the less to divide among his poorer fellow-burgers.

August 7.—Had breakfasted at the Croix Blanche, and cleared out of Am Stag, by 6 A.M. I was never in bed after 5. The bottom land having now completely thinned out, you here enter on the ascent of the St. Gothard Pass. Henceforth the road is cut in, or built upon, the mountain side, and frequently changes from side to side of the Reuss.

At the last bridge before you enter Wasen, the Reuss flows below in a channel it has excavated for itself, so deep, dark, and narrow, that you cannot make out where the water is, till you have looked for it. On the left of the bridge, the eastern bank of the torrent is much higher than the opposite side. The place is called the Priest’s Leap—Pfaffensprung. Here Ammer repeated the legend, you will find in the books, of the enamoured Priest, who baffled his pursuers, in the days before the bridge, which were also the days of faith, by leaping across the stream, with the cause of his lapse in his arms. He concluded the story with the comment, that, ‘if the Priest did it, the devil must have helped him;’ then adding, as a comment on his comment, that ‘in these days the Devil has become inattentive to his friends, and does not aid them as he did of yore.’ This legend will help us to understand how it came about, that, in order to promote morality, the people of these Cantons persuaded their priests to keep concubines.

I was at Wasen, seven and a half miles, by 8 o’clock. The road, all the way, was at this time of the morning, in the shadow of the eastern mountains. Yesterday evening at Am Stag, I had debated with myself the question, whether it was better to have, or not to have, an object. I had walked a little way up the Maderaner Thal, under the influence of a growing desire to give up my pre-arranged route—arranged because I had an object—and to take to the mountains. There was before me an inviting opportunity, the charming Maderaner Thal, by which I might find a way to Dissentis. But virtue triumphed. And now that I was at Wasen, and saw a party starting for the Meien Thal, the same question recurred. I had had enough of carriage-road valley-work for the present, and wished for something rougher and harder. Having, however, once entered on the path of virtue, you keep it, if only for the sake of consistency. This was the first time I had ever travelled, when on my own hook, along a prescribed route. In former excursions, I had always left the route throughout, from day to day, an open question. It is very pleasant, so unlike staying quietly at home, to be going you do not at any time know exactly where, and you do not at all care where. An object, which requires a plan, makes this impossible, and substitutes bondage for what the recollection of former excursions tells you would be freedom. An object is not bad, still no object may be better. But I had also another reason for adhering to my pre-arranged plan, which was, that it would bring me to Andermatt, where I was to meet my wife, and the blue boy of last year’s excursion; and some mountain work with them was part of this pre-arranged plan. But still I said to myself this morning, It is all pre-arranged, and that excludes liberty.

Above Wasen the road, having crossed to the eastern side of the valley, passes through a pine forest. The trees are well grown, and the roadside is full of ferns. The Reuss below is unusually noisy. In places the lofty mountains ahead are in sight, and through openings in the forest, occasionally, the mountains on the opposite side of the valley, with here and there on their flanks a little prairie; on some of these a small summer châlet, or hay-grange. As I walked on alone, a little ahead of Ammer, the feeling came over me that I was advancing into one of Nature’s sanctuaries, one of her great laboratories. It was as if I was being admitted to see the anatomy and mechanism of nature, the rocky skeleton, the mountain-ribs of the solid earth. ‘And here too,’ I said to myself, ‘she is busy making the rivers, and’ (as the dinning noise of the Reuss reminded me of the hundreds of glacier-fed rills out of which it was formed) ‘she is making them out of the glaciers; and the glaciers she had made by lifting up the mountains to attract the clouds, the vapour of distant oceans; and then causing its precipitation from their cold and rarefied atmosphere. So is she forming rivers. And these mountain Reusses are grinding down rocks and pebbles, and floating off the vegetable mould, to become the particles of the soil, that is, down below, to form broad green meadows and fruitful golden cornfields. The skittish, noisy stream is young and playful now, and leaps from rock to rock like a young lion. When it has attained to its maturity it will move majestically. Cities will then be built on its banks, and commerce will make a highway of its surface. Up here man has but very slight hold on the scene. In this workshop of Nature her work almost excludes his. He is not the master here. His business and gain here are to understand nature.’ My reverie was suddenly interrupted by the apparition, at the wayside, of a woman on her knees, breaking stones for metalling the road. I could not pass her without a word: even a word would be in some sort a recognition of our common humanity. Poor soul! In a life of 57 years she had seen no more of the wide, rich, busy world than may be seen at Wasen, and a few miles above and below it. Her days were now spent in quarrying pieces of rock above the road, bringing them down to the road, and breaking them in heaps by the roadside. It was with her a good day, a very good one, when she could earn sixty cents. But she was well satisfied with a day that gave her fifty cents, just fivepence. Hard work, and exposure in all kinds of weather, hot and cold, wet and dry, early and late, had scored her face with many wrinkles, long and deep; had enlarged her mouth, and had widened her nostrils, for she had to breathe hard; and by making her eyelids swollen and pendulous, had more than half-buried her eyes. All this had given her somewhat of the features and expression of an ape. I wondered whether in her long solitary days she ever compared her life with that of the gay and prosperous thousands coming and going in carriages, in making a road for whom her life was expended. And I wondered how many of them compared their lot with hers.

On returning the following week, this way, I found her again, at the same place, in the same attitude, engaged in the same work. For a few years longer, perhaps, she will be able to continue it; and then she will have sunk, out of sight of the folk who pass in carriages, to something lower and harder, and will be looking back regretfully to the better times, when between sunrise and sunset, she could earn fivepence.

In an hour from Wasen I reached Göschenen. Here the aspect of things becomes what you might have been expecting in a great and famous pass. All the way up from Am Stag the valley of the Reuss had been narrowing and hardening: and now a break in its western wall forms the Göschenen Thal. You see the snow-field of the Damma, and the eastern glacier-shed of the Damma, of the Galen, and of the Rhone-Stock; on the other or western side of which is the vast Rhone glacier. Here, as in Alpine, and as indeed in all scenes, thought aids in deepening the interest of what is at the moment before your eyes. As I looked around I felt as the spider feels in the centre of its web. Along one thread, sensitive to thought, I passed by the arrowy Rhone to the sunny Middle sea, through thrifty Switzers, and light-hearted Frenchmen. Along another by the vine-clad Rhine to the stormy North Sea, through studious Germans and plodding Hollanders. Along a third attached to the next mountain a few miles further on, by the way of the Ticino, Lago Maggiore, and the Po, through many cities of the quickwitted Italian, cities of ancient renown in the wealthy field of teeming Lombardy, to the gusty Adriatic, and its lovely Queen, whose glories have not yet all departed.

No sooner have you passed through Göschenen than Schöllinen takes up, and advances, the interest of the spectacle. The gorge now becomes narrower, more precipitous, more iron-faced. Here it is that you come upon the mouth of the tunnel that is being bored beneath St. Gothard for fifteen miles, from Schöllinen to Airolo, all in granite, with Andermatt and St. Gothard above it. You are walking on the carriage road, a grand work completed thirty years back. The old horse-road it superseded is close on your right. On its margin, on your left, is the long line of iron tubing, of sufficient diameter for a man to crawl through, which brings from a higher level the water power that is being used in the excavation of the tunnel for the modern railway, that will supersede the carriage-road, as that in its turn had superseded the horse-road. Our world is large and busy, but the world in which our children will play their part will be larger and busier.

You cut off a few zigzags. The way becomes more precipitous, narrower, more iron-faced; and you find yourself, a few minutes beyond Schöllinen, on the Devil’s bridge. Black granite rises in sheer cliffs, mountain-high above you. The Reuss thunders seventy-five feet below the arch on which you are standing. You are wet with the spray. A sense of personal nothingness, of annihilation, comes over you. You feel as a shrimp might between the jaws of a whale.

The granite appears absolutely naked; but a closer inspection shows you a few humble Alpine plants in such crannies and crevices as their roots could find a hold in, together with a little mould from decayed lichens to feed upon. And, here and there, but never rising more than a few inches above the storm-swept surface, you will make out a Pinus pumilio, or two, but of so weather-worn, and weather-stained, and snow-crushed an aspect as to be thoroughly toned-down to the dark granite. How bravely and obstinately does life struggle to maintain itself amidst all this wrath and desolation! It will have the whole world. It will not submit to exclusion anywhere. Even up here, though so nipped, and starved, and frozen; so snow-smothered, and storm-torn, it will not shrink for asserting its universal right.

You pass through a tunnel, excavated in the perpendicular granite, which here overhangs the dashing, dinning Reuss on your right. As you step out of the tunnel the broad grass-clad expanse of Urseren Thal is before you: Andermatt at the near side; Hospenthal, two miles off, on the far side. All grass between. The mountain slopes, too, around are all in this livery of soft green. Where else did one ever see such a contrast, and so unexpected! Behind you the ruthless granite and eternal snow: before you the sheen of a smooth lawn, with these busy little communities nestling in its bosom. No one, who comes along this way, on foot, on a bright sunny day, as this was, will ever forget this contrast.

At the St. Gothard Hotel, at Andermatt, I came up with my sac, which I had sent on in the morning from Am Stag by an empty return carriage. I here also found a telegram from my wife—she was at Pontresina—which told me that she could not be at Andermatt till the evening of the twelfth. To-day was the seventh. Nothing, therefore, could be clearer—it was obvious in a moment—that the best thing for me to do was to go on at once to Como, to breathe for some hours the air of Italy, and to gladden my eyes with an Italian scene; returning early on the eleventh, so that I might devote a part of that day, and the whole of the next, to such inquiries as I might wish to make at Andermatt and Hospenthal. I had left Ammer behind at Schöllinen, where he had fallen in with an old friend. On his arrival, about half an hour after mine, I announced to him my resolve; and told him we should be off at 4 o’clock. It was now 1. This would give him time to get his dinner, visit his acquaintances in the place, and consume as many pipes, and thin, long, black, Swiss cigars as he pleased; for it appeared to be his custom when tired of the one to take to the other. Being of that conservative turn of mind which is averse to changes of plan, as well as of anything else; and, too, being now of the age, when exertion begins to be no longer pleasing for its own sake, he seemed to think that it was hardly worth while to leave Switzerland for so short a time. At the appointed hour, however, we were again under weigh; and at 6h. 40m. had reached the Hotel on the summit of the Pass. The books give 24 miles for this day’s tramp: but this, from the time we took to do it, and the ease with which it was done, I think beyond the true distance.

From Andermatt you walk through the level mead of Urseren to Hospenthal, 2¼ miles. The grass of course is carefully cultivated, for the whole dependence of the people is on their cows and horses. Andermatt and Hospenthal are towns of horses rather than of men, for here the two great trunk lines of communication from east, along the Alps, to west, and from north, across the Alps, to south, bisect each other at right angles. It is a central point for much traffic, and so a great many horses are needed. It is fortunate that there is so much grass here, for one cannot tell what would be done without it. With the exception of some patches of potatoes, chiefly on the sunny foot of the mountain on the opposite side of this great Alpine prairie, everything that you see is grass. At Hospenthal you cross the Reuss, and again begin to ascend. The mountains are not precipitous and craggy, but somewhat rounded, as if their asperities had been planed off in the glacial epoch. On them are no trees; only Alpine pasture all the way, gradually deteriorating as you ascend. To one fresh from the Devil’s bridge (I wish it had a better name), and the Urseren Thal, these mountains are full of contrast and interest. Three such scenes in a single walk make it a memorable one. Sometimes you are far above the Reuss, sometimes it is close alongside of you. Sometimes the cows are below you in a deep valley, sometimes above you on a mountain flank. At last, not very far from the summit, you cross the Reuss for the last time, by a bridge which is the boundary, on the road, between the Cantons of Uri and Ticino. It is, hereabouts, a small stream, not far from its source in a small mountain lake hard by; but what would not one give to have such a small stream passing one’s door at home—so clear, so pebbly, so cool, so lively, so murmurous. For the latter part of the way the snow was often, in large masses, by the roadside. There was more of it still lingering on the mountains this year than usual, because there had been a late spring with heavy snow storms. The Hotel, nearly 7,000 feet above the sea, is on the summit of the col, in a deep depression, surrounded by blackish-gray, jagged, naked peaks, with snow in the interstices and ravines. But even here animal life is far from wanting; for in the dark tarn, on the edge of which the Hotel stands, and which is sufficiently deep not to be frozen to the bottom, fish are to be found. There is another and shallower tarn close by without fish. In front of the Hotel is some expanse of grass, a part of the summer pasture of the summit, which maintains for two months 200 cows.