As the summer had fled autumn winds began to whistle through the lindens of La Lorraine, and the snow began to fall upon its pretty garden, warning the author to fly south with his fledglings and their mother before the Alpine
passes were closed by real winter. Cooper resigned the consulate at Lyons, which was given him solely "to avoid the appearance of going over to the enemy" while abroad. A carriage and two servitors were engaged. One of these, Caspar, had his soldiering under the first Napoleon, and many were the camp tales he had to tell in a way to please his employers. At the old town of Alstetten, with painted wooden houses at the foot of the Am Stoss, they arrived, more than ready for breakfast, which was somewhat delayed because, said Cooper, "our German was by no means classical; and English, Italian, and French were all Hebrew to the good people of the inn." It was "easy to make
the hostess understand that we wished to eat,—but what would we eat? In this crisis I bethought me of a long-neglected art, and crowed like a cock. The shrill strain hardly reached the ear of the good woman before it was answered by such laughter as none but village lungs could raise. William—an admirable mimic—began to cackle like a hen. In due time we had a broiled fowl, an omelette, and boiled eggs." At another place where they stopped for mid-day luncheon Cooper writes: "We asked for a fruit-tart, and—odors and nosegays!—they gave us one made of onions, which they thought very good fruit in its way, and we ate exactly as much as we wished."
"The baths of Pfäffer," he wrote "in my own unworthy person have wrought a sudden and wondrous cure"; and of his visit to the Devil's Bridge over the Reuss: "We entered a gorge between frightful rocks, where the river was fretting and struggling to get in before us." From the yawning mouth of a gloomy cave came the tinkling bells of pack-horses to Italy by the St. Gothard. To the roar of the river and the rushing of winds without they plunged through this dark "Hole of Uri," which brought them to
a rugged rock-rift pass with but a thread of heaven's blue far above them; and here "a slight, narrow bridge of a single arch spanned the gorge with a hardihood that caused one to shudder." Its slender, unrailed, fifteen feet of width was eighty of span, and one hundred above the boiling torrent that fell on broken rocks below, and over it; wrote Cooper: "The wind blew so furiously that I really wished for a rope to hold on by. This was the far-famed Devil's Bridge; other bridges may have been built by imps, but Beëlzebub himself had a hand in this."
