And I am for the time being a child of the Alps. I have a mountaineer’s spirit in me, and I say: “I will go!” The next thing is to secure an Alpine outfit, which consists of spiked shoes, an Alpenstock, an ice ax and a rope. These things in our hands and neatly strapped on our backs, Johnson and I leave the social haunts of men, and start out to “do the Alps.” On the “Rainbow,” we sail over Lake Lucerne from end to end. We then walk to Fluelen and Altdorf, where is laid the scene of Schiller’s immortal play, “William Tell.” We see Tell’s statue, erected on the spot where with crossbow he shot the apple off his son Walter’s head. We visit the place where during a raging storm, Tell sprang from the boat upon a projecting rock, thereby saving himself from the dungeon, and rescuing Switzerland from the hands of tyranny. We climb the Rigi, the mountain that gave Mark Twain so much trouble. Standing upon its elevated summit, we look down upon eleven silvery lakes spread out in the valleys 5,000 feet below. We now strike out over Brüning Pass for Brienz and Interlaken. The most interesting object during this delightful sail was the famous Griessbach Falls. As the steamer approaches, all eyes are fixed upon the rushing torrent whose foaming waters, eager to escape from their mountain prison, burst forth from the mountain side, and leap from rock to rock until they mingle with the placid lake 1,200 feet below! Interlaken, as its name indicates, is between the lakes, Brienz and Thun. This is not a city, but a small, characteristic Swiss village, hemmed in by two lakes, and two mountains, whose precipitous sides are feathered over with fir trees. Indeed, the surroundings are so picturesque and beautiful that we make Hotel de Nord headquarters for several days, during which time we make several delightful excursions on and around the lakes. Our stay is made more pleasant because of the company of L. Woodhull and J. A. Worthman, of Dayton, Ohio; but theirs is a flying trip, hence we are soon separated. We now penetrate the very heart of the Alps. We spend a month, and walk more than five hundred miles, creeping through the windings of the mountains; in following up streams to their sources; in crossing narrow chasms whose yawning depths even now make me dizzy when I think of them; in climbing rugged peaks where one false step would have dashed us against the jagged rocks, two, three, and sometimes four, thousand feet below; in letting ourselves down by ropes into deep gorges on whose rocky floor ray of sun or moonbeam has never fallen; in traversing seas of ice or glacier fields, two of which, the Rhone and the Aletsch glaciers, are the most extensive in the Alps, being fifteen miles long and from one to three miles wide.