and decidedly smaller than Brunnen, this town--if town it may be called--of less than fifteen hundred souls, with its neighbouring strip of lake-side territory, maintained for more than four long centuries its status as the smallest independent sovereign state in Europe. The place once belonged to the Dukes of Hapsburgh, who "levied duties on lambs, goatskins, fish, and grey cloth," and by them it was mortgaged to the barons of Ramstein, who parted with its possession to the house of Von Moos, of Lucerne. From the latter Gersau bought its freedom in 1390 for the sum of 690 pfennigs, which it had painfully "scraped together after ten years of hard toil." "They had already, thirty-one years before, concluded a league with the Four Forest Cantons, and had even rendered assistance to the Confederates in the battle of Sempach; where a native of the town captured the banner of Hohenzollern and brought it home and placed it in the church of Gersau, which even in its present form bears witness to the pride of the little territory." Thus Gersau freed herself in the Middle Ages from the house of Hapsburgh, and triumphed against the house of Hohenzollern, just as civilized Europe, more than five hundred years later, agonised and struggled only yesterday: "Haud aliter puppesque tuæ pubesque tuorum Aut portum tenet aut pleno subit ostia velo, Perge modo, et, qua te ducit via, dirige gressum." [Illustration: LAKE URI FROM BRUNNEN.] This central compartment of the lake is closed towards the east, as already stated, by the bare rock peaks of the Great and Little Mythen. These have been compared, unless I mistake, to the twin Langdale Pikes, in Westmoreland, as seen from the head of Windermere; and probably the comparison has just as much validity as comparisons of the sort are ever capable of asserting. Nature, who is studious never to reproduce herself with complete and meticulous accuracy, is fond enough of teasing us with suggestion and reminiscence, and often enough finds pleasure in moulding "two lovely berries" on a single stem. The Mythen are removed, again like Wordsworth's "lusty twins," to a quite appreciable distance from the margin of the lake; but here, whereas in Westmoreland the intervening country is the sweetest confusion imaginable of undulating pasture and coppice along the broken course of the Brathay, the broad plinth that rises up in slow but persistent gradient from Brunnen to the foot of the Mythen is, to the writer's way of thinking (and he knows of no support from the judgment of other critics), the weakest bit of composition along the whole basin of Lucerne, and a tract of country--it is luckily very small--as dull and profitless as any to be found among the Alps. Yet this, in fact, as part and parcel of the Canton of Schwyz, is in a sense the very heart and core of Switzerland, and the veritable holy cradle of Swiss freedom. It has given its name to the whole Confederation, and the