Right behind the little inn, where we staid that night, frowned a threatening, almost perpendicular mountain, 12,000 feet high. What if that dark pile should tumble over on the village, we thought, as we looked out into the moonlight. How little we dreamed what was about to happen. We were hardly back in our home in Zurich, when a telegram announced that the mountain had fallen, that Elm and all the people had been destroyed. Shortly, Consul Mason, of Basel, and myself hurried by rail to Schwanden, and in a little wagonette went up the comparatively easy valley road to what was once Elm. The sight was terrific. A part of the mountain overhanging the village slipped off on Sunday, just as the people had returned from afternoon church services. The mighty debris of rock and earth overwhelmed and buried the pretty village. It filled the valley for half a mile. Mason and I climbed over granite boulders and broken rocks as big as a house. Nothing of the town was to be seen, the houses had been torn to pieces and buried fifty feet below. Nearly everybody had been killed. There were no funerals, for till this day the peasants of Elm sleep under the mountain that overwhelmed them. The few who had escaped, by being on hillsides or out looking at their herds on the higher fields, wandered about as if dazed. They shed no tears. To them, the end of the world had come. Some of them told me, without a tremor in their voices, how they stood on some high place and saw their wives, their fathers or their children first thrown into the air by the awful concussion and then buried with their houses. The keeper of the little inn where we stopped that night had been spared, and told us how he saw the big iron bridge across the river Sernf tossed a hundred feet into the air, twisted like a straw, and thrown against a hillside. The river bed had been dammed up by the falling rock, and the waters now wandered aimlessly over the ocean of debris above the people’s homes. It is all silent now, up there in the Alps where Elm stood, silent save where the winds from the mountain peaks on moonlight nights moan a requiem to the sleeping dead. _September 20._--President Garfield died yesterday at 5 A. M. (Swiss time), and all the world went into mourning. I draped the flag here, and put it out at the consulate. Many people called to express their sorrow. A more unprovoked murder of a ruler never occurred. The President’s agony since July 2d has been terrible, and his courage to bear it has been tremendous. Early this month, I made a little foot tour in Ireland. Everybody said, “Don’t go!” Even in Dublin, a friend warned me, saying: “It is a terrible time in Ireland. Landlords are being murdered and farmers locked up in prison. You are a stranger here. The English soldiers, on the watch everywhere, will take you for an American Fenian. The Irish will take you for an English spy.”