The tyrant, exasperated by the candid reply of Tell, said to him, “I have promised thee life, but thou shalt spend it in a dungeon.” He was pinioned by the guards, and thrown into Gessler’s boat, and they started for the castle of Küssnacht at the other end of the lake. Soon a dangerous surge came on, such as at certain seasons occurs suddenly, produced by contrary winds. The boat was in imminent peril from this tempest. Tell being a skilful boatman, and familiar with the sunken rocks and dangerous reefs of the long narrow lake, was unbound, placed at the helm, and ordered to land the boat. He at once steered straight to a flat piece of rock beneath the sharp sides of the Achsenberg. No sooner had the boat touched than Tell seized his bow, sprang on to the narrow ledge, and, at the same time, with his foot pushed back the frail craft into the angry waters. Quickly finding his way up the rock, and knowing where his enemy must land, he hastened there, and as Gessler approached, shot him through the heart. “A wife, Lucretia, liberated Rome; a father, William Tell, disenthralled Helvetia.” No one can go to that rock-framed, mountain-embosomed, “that sacred lake withdrawn among the hills,” and so well known as the Vierwaldstättersee, or Lake of the Four Forest Cantons, and specially that part famed as the theatre of Tell’s exploits, and called the Urnersee (or Uri Lake), and examine the historic spot and see the numerous evidences, many of them contemporaneous, without being convinced that William Tell was as much an historical personage as Julius Cæsar, Napoleon Bonaparte, or George Washington; and that he lived, acted, and died, as the legend relates. One visiting these various places, must feel the force of what Latrobe wrote: “There is something in the grandeur and magnificence of the scene which surrounds you, which gently but irresistibly opens the heart to a belief in the truth of the page upon which the events which have hallowed them are recorded. Whatever a man may think, however he may be inclined to question the strength of the evidence upon which the relations of these facts rest while in his closet, I should think there are but few sufficiently insensible and dogmatical to stand firm and bar their hearts against the credibility which steals over them while contemplating the spots themselves.” At a bend of the lake, a short distance from Brunnen, there rises from the water a slender rock pillar, some eighty feet in height. This is the _Mythenstein_, a noble monument, fashioned in the morning of the world by Nature herself, for the bard who was to hymn the rise of Helvetian freedom and the praise of its hero. The rock bears in golden letters the simple inscription: “Dem Sänger Tell’s Friedrich Schiller Die Urkantone 1859.” (“To the bard of Tell, Friedrich Schiller, the original Cantons, 1859.”)[103]