The end came, as it often does after long anxiety, when least expected. The travelling party had been under the necessity of staying their wanderings and pitching their tent for a longer season than usual. For many reasons the leaders had chosen one of the loveliest and most admired scenes in Europe for their temporary resting place. It was early summer again, so that the Stanhopes might resort to a mountain and lake district where the air braced every nerve, and which afforded opportunity for feats of climbing and boating, to attract and occupy that member of the family whose delectation and employment were always the first cares, while the weary might rest in preparation for a fresh campaign. The lake of the four cantons lay shimmering in its beauty, peacock-green or blue-black in tint as it happened to be in light or in shade. Great walnut-trees grew by its margin, and dipped their branches in its waters, while the most stunted pines ceased to flourish on the bare short grass or the rocky summits of its giant guardians. There were lower mountains that would have been well-grown mountains anywhere else, which rose sheer from the lake, and were clothed with waving wood from the soles of their feet to the crown of their heads; but one forgot them in the near presence of the bald Rhigi and the desolate Pilatus and the remoter vision of the blue range of the Engelberg seamed and tracked with everlasting snows. The little burgher town, so grandly framed, was not altogether smoothed down from its ancient ruggedness and picturesqueness into modern commonplace uniformity, or, still worse, smartness. True, its great hotels, with bands of music for evening promenaders, were trying to the sensitive visitor, and its shops with their staple of carved wood, however pretty, and verging here and there on art proper, were not without their objections. But there was something to be said for the old covered rickety bridges over the pale green water, with the rude representations of the grotesque horrors of the Dance of Death; the Water Tower; the bold rough rendering on the face of the rock of the great sculptor’s idea of the lion of Switzerland, wounded to death, its paw still defending the broken lily of France.