Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/180

CHAPTER X

A Little Journey in the Land of William Tell — Basle and Lucerne — On the Way to Interlaken — The Jungfrau and the Giesbach — Byron and Voltaire — Geneva and Mont Blanc — An Ascent of the Brevent — Over the Simplon Road and through the Gorge of Gondo — On the Italian Slope.

My trip through Switzerland must ever remain a pleasant memory of my first visit to the Continent in 1869.

Basle is a picturesque old town, with its ten-storied houses — almost as quaint, some of them, as those of Nuremberg — crowding down to the rushing and overflowing Rhine River, which here is more tumultuous than anywhere else we have seen it. That troublesome water-spirit. Undine's uncle, Kuhleborn, who was so inconvenient alike to his friends and his foes, and who had to be held down by very heavy masonry even in the courtyard of his niece, has taken up his abode in the Rhine, beneath the walls of Basle; and it is an everrecurring wonder to careful and anxious mothers why the Basle children are not all drowned. It is evident that if they once got within the grasp of the water-spirit they would never escape, for he lashes the green glacier tide into a superb fury here, and the Rhine is nowhere more impressive than at Basle.

The Münster is a delightful nut for the antiquarian gourmand. It has two lofty towers, is Gothic and quaint, and religious in its sombreness, with those em-