Let us run boldly in. Ten minutes, and the boat is safely in a shed, and its captain well housed in an excellent room; and, having ordered dinner, it was delicious to jump into the lake for a swim, all hot with the hot day's work, and to stretch away out to the deep, and circle round and round in these limpid waters, with a nice little bath-room to come back to, and fresh dry clothes to put on. In the evening we had very pretty English music, a family party improvised in an hour, and broken up for a moonlight walk, while, all this time (one fancied), in the big hotel of the town the guests were in stiff _coteries_, or each set retired to its sitting-room, and lamenting how unsociable everybody else had become. I never was more comfortable than here, with a few English families "en pension," luxuriating for the sum of six francs per day, and an old Russian General, most warlike and courteous, who would chat with you by the hour, on the seat under the shady chestnut, and smiled at the four persevering fishermen whose bag consisted, I believe, of three bites, one of them allowed on all hands to have been _bonâ fide_. Then on Sunday we went to Lucerne, to church, where a large congregation listened to a very good sermon from the well-known Secretary of the Society for Colonial and Continental Churches. At least every traveller, if not every home-stayed Englishman, ought to support this Association, because it many times supplies just that food and rest which the soul needs so much on a Sunday abroad, when the pleasures of foreign travel are apt to make only the mind and body constitute the man. I determined to paddle from Lucerne by the river Reuss, which flows out of the lake and through the town. This river is one of four--the Rhine, Rhone, Reuss, and Ticino, which all rise near together in the neighbourhood of the St. Gothard; and yet, while one flows into the German ocean, another falls into the Mediterranean, both between them having first made nearly the compass of Switzerland. The walking tourist comes often upon the rapid Reuss as it staggers and tumbles among the Swiss mountains. To me it had a special interest, for I once ascended the Galenhorn over the glaciers it starts from, and with only a useless guide, who lost his head and then lost his way, and then lost his temper and began to cry. We groped about in a fog until snow began to fall, and the snowstorm lasted for six hours--a weary time spent by us wandering in the dark and without food. At length we were discovered by some people sent out with lights to search for the benighted pleasure-seeker. The Reuss has many cascades and torrent gorges as it runs among the rough crags, and it falls nearly 6,000 feet before it reaches the Lake of Lucerne, this lake itself being still 1,400 feet above the sea.