A panic seized us ladies. The cliff rose vertically on the inner side, without allowing us the possibility of a clamber, and in our fright, before the gentlemen could prevent us, we leaped over a low railing, which there served as a parapet, on to a ledge of rock, a few yards square, rising straight up from the lake hundreds of feet below. All recollection of their historical interest vanished from our minds; for, as the cattle danced along, they looked as scared and wild as ourselves, and it was not until they had passed without noticing us, and that their dark-eyed masters had spoken some soft Italian words to us, that we fully realized the extent of our imprudence. Had any one of these animals jumped up over the railing, as we afterwards heard they have sometimes done, who can say what might not have happened? Fortunately, no harm ensued beyond a flutter of nerves, which betrayed itself by Anna’s turning round to a set of handsome goats that soon followed the cattle, crying out to them in her own peculiar German: “Nix kommen! nix kommen!” Fluelen has nothing to show beyond the picturesqueness of a village situated in such scenery and a collection of lumbering diligences and countless carriages, awaiting the hourly arrival of the steamers from Lucerne. The knell of these old diligences, however, has tolled, for the St. Gothard Railway tunnel has been commenced near Arnsty, and though it may require years to finish it, its “opening day” will surely come. Half an hour’s drive up the lovely valley brought us to Altorf, at the foot of the Grünwald, which, in accord with its name, is clothed with a virgin forest, now called the “Bann forest,” because so useful is it in protecting the town from avalanches and landslips that the Uri government never permits it to be touched. Altorf, like so many of the capitals in these forest cantons, has a small population, 2,700 inhabitants only, but it has many good houses, for it was burnt down in 1799 and rebuilt in a better manner. Tell’s story forms its chief interest, and certainly did so in our eyes. We rushed at once to the square, where one fountain is said to mark the spot where Tell took aim, and another that upon which his boy stood. Tradition says that the latter one replaced the lime-tree against which the son leant, portions of which existed until 1567. A paltry plaster statue of the hero is in the same square, but the most remarkable relic of antiquity is an old tower close by, which Herr H---- assured us is proved by documents to have been built before 1307, the date of Tell’s history. Had the young friends we left at “Tell’s Platform” accompanied us hither, Emily might have quoted Schiller to us at length. But George, having recently bought a Tauchnitz edition of Freeman’s _Growth of the English Constitution_, which opens with a fine description of the annual elections of this canton, he earnestly pleaded a prolongation of our drive to the spot where this takes place,