by the foot of the Axen Mountain, to the right as you come out of the Bay of Uri, Tell grasped his bow and leaped upon a flat rock there, climbed up the mountain while the boat tossed to and fro against the rocks, and fled through the land of the men of Schwyz. But the Bailiff escaped the storm also, and landed by Küssnacht, where he fell with Tell's arrow through him. It should be remembered that this was Tell's deed alone: the hour which the people had agreed upon for their deliverance had not come; they had no part in the death of Gessler. Carlyle has remarked this as appearing also in Schiller's drama, in the construction of which, he says, "there is no connection, or a very slight one, between the enterprise of Tell and that of the men of Rütli." It was not a deed conformable to law or the highest ethics, yet it was one which mankind is ever ready to forgive and applaud; and the echo of it through the ages will die away only when hatred of tyranny and wrathful impatience under hopeless oppression die away also from the hearts of men. Tell was an outlaw, and he took an outlaw's vengeance: it was life against life. And yet it is a curious fact, that the historian of Switzerland (that wonderful genius, Johannes Müller, who is reported to have read more books than any man in Europe, in proof of which they point you to his fifty folio volumes of excerpts in the Town Library at Schaffhausen) suggests as a reason why there were only one hundred and fourteen persons, who had known Tell, to gather together in 1388, not much more than thirty years after his death, at the erection of a chapel dedicated to his memory on the rock where he leaped ashore, that Tell did not often leave Bürglen, where he dwelt, and that, according to the ethics of that period, the deed was not one likely to attract inquisitive wonderers to him. There is hardly an event or character in history which is not to somebody a myth or a phantom; and so Tell has not escaped the skepticism of men. But those who doubt his existence have little experience of history, says Müller. Grasser was the first to remark the resemblance between the adventures of Tell and those of a certain Tocco, or Toke, or Palnatoke, of Denmark, which are related by Saxo Grammaticus, a learned historian who flourished in Denmark in the twelfth century, of which kingdom and its dependencies he compiled an elaborate history, first printed at Paris in 1486; but the Danish Tocco, who is supposed to have existed in the latter half of the tenth century, was wholly unknown to the Swiss, who, if ever, came to the Alps before that time. The Icelanders, also, have a similar story about another hero, which appears in the "Vilkinasaga" of the fourteenth century. It is more likely that the Danes and other Northern people got their tradition from the Swiss, by way of the Hanse Towns perhaps, if we are to be permitted to believe in but one original tradition, which is not less arbitrary than unphilosophic.