[Illustration: PILATUS FROM STANSTAD.] The visitor is now fairly landed in the state of Unterwalden, the second most mountainous and romantic of the Four Forest Cantons. The Swiss have solved to perfection the problem of Home Rule: here is a little territory of less than two hundred square miles, and with a population in 1900 of less than thirty thousand people (less than that of Peterborough), which is yet, for all domestic intents and purposes, an independent sovereign state. Nay, not content with this, since these thirty thousand odd people, on their odd two hundred miles of mountain-land, were ill-content to dwell together in amity, the state is actually sub-divided, like Bâle and Appenzell, into two independent halves. Each of these is confined mostly to a single big valley, with its tributaries; and each has a capital that would hardly pass muster in the mill districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire for a fair-sized village. The half-canton of Obwalden is thus roughly conterminous with the valley of the Obwalden Aa, and has Sarnen, on the great highroad from Lucerne to Meiringen across the Brünig, for its rustic metropolis, whilst Nidwalden comprises most of the valley of the Nidwalden Aa, and finds its seat of government at Stans. Both these valleys, though largely sub-Alpine (the head of the Nidwalden Aa alone pierces deep into the heart of the greater hills, in the neighbourhood of Engelberg), are full of lovely scenery, though perhaps apt to be neglected by the too impatient tourist in his eagerness for the greater glories of Uri and the Bernese Highlands. It is pleasant, again, after so much destructive historical criticism, to encounter traces in these valleys of a less widely recognized Swiss hero, whose services to his country, if less dramatic than those of Tell and von Winkelried, are at any rate more authentic, and perhaps of wider import. Nicolas von der Flüe has found no niche in popular school histories, has evoked no "Battle of the Books," and has inspired no great national drama. None the less his mild personality appears with high significance at a tremulously critical period in the evolution of Swiss unity and Swiss independence. Whether or not we accept the story of the famous meeting on the Rütli, it is certain that the foundations of free Switzerland were laid in August, 1291, by the perpetual alliance, for the maintenance of their ancient rights and liberties, of the three Cantons of Uri, Unterwalden, and Schwyz. [Illustration: LOOKING UP THE LAKE, FROM BECKENRIED.]