On the night of Wednesday before Martinmas, on the 10th of November, 1307, Fürst, Melchthal, and Stauffacher brought each from his own Canton ten upright men to the Rütli, to deliberate honestly together. And when they came there and remembered their inherited freedom, and the eternal brotherly bond between them, consecrated by the danger of the times, they feared neither Albrecht nor the power of Austria; and they took each other by the hand, and said, that "in these matters no one was to act after his own fancy; no one was to desert another; that in friendship they would live and die; each was so to strive to preserve the ancient rights of the people that the Swiss through all time might taste of this friendship; neither should the property or the rights of the Count of Hapsburg be molested, nor the Bailiffs or their servants lose one drop of blood; but the freedom which their fathers gave them they would bequeath to their children": and then, when remembering that upon what they did now the fate of their posterity depended, each looked upon his friend, consoled. And Walther Fürst, Werner Stauffacher, and Arnold an der Halden of Melchthal lifted their hands to heaven, and, in the name of God, who created emperor and peasant with the inalienable rights of man, swore to maintain their freedom; and when the thirty heard this, each one raised his hand and swore the same by God and the Saints;--and then each went his way to his hut, and was silent, and wintered his cattle. In the mean while it happened that the Bailiff Hermann Gessler was shot dead by Wilhelm Tell, who was of Bürglen, at the entrance of the Schächenthal, a half-hour from Altorf, in Uri,--son-in-law of Walther Fürst, and a man of some substance, for he had the steward-ship in fee in Bürglen of the Frauenmüster Abbey in Zürich,--one of the conspirators. Out of wanton tyranny, or suspicious of the breaking out of disturbances, Gessler determined to discover who bore the joke most impatiently; and, after the symbolical way of the times and the people, set up a hat, (it was on the 18th of November,) to represent the dignity of the Duke Albrecht of Austria, and commanded all to do it homage. The story of Tell's refusal, and of the apple placed on the head of his son to be shot at, the world knows far and wide. Convinced by his success that God was with him, Tell confessed, that, if the matter had gone wrong, he would have had his revenge upon the Bailiff. Gessler did not dare to detain him in Uri, on account of Tell's many friends and relations, but took him up the lake, contrary to the traditions of the people, which forbade foreign imprisonment. They had not got far beyond the Rütli, when the föhn-wind, breaking loose from the gulfs of the Gothard, threw the waves into a rage, and the rocks echoed with its angry cries. In this moment of deadly danger, Gessler commanded them to unbind Tell, who, he knew, was an excellent boatman; and as they passed