o the Lake of
Wallenstatt, cross into the valley of the Toggenburg, and so make your
way northward and eastward around the base of the mountains back to the
starting-point, you will have passed only through the territory of St.
Gall. Appenzell is an Alpine island, wholly surrounded by the former
canton. From whatever side you approach, you must climb in order to get
into it. It is a nearly circular tract, failing from the south towards
the north, but lifted, at almost every point, over the adjoining lands.
This altitude and isolation is an historical as well as a physical
peculiarity. When the Abbots of St. Gall, after having reduced the
entire population of what is now two Cantons to serfdom, became more
oppressive as their power increased, it was the mountain shepherds who,
in the year 1403, struck the first blow for liberty. Once free, they
kept their freedom, and established a rude democracy on the heights,
similar in form and spirit to the league which the Forest Cantons had
founded nearly a century before. An echo from the meadow of Gruetli
reached the wild valleys around the Sentis, and Appenzell, by the middle
of the fifteenth century, became one of the original states out of which
Switzerland has grown.

I find something very touching and admirable in this fragment of hardly
noticed history. The people isolated themselves by their own act, held
together, organized a simple yet sufficient government, and maintained
their sturdy independence, while their brethren on every side, in the
richer lands below them, were fast bound in the gyves of a priestly
despotism. Individual liberty seems to be a condition inseparable from
mountain life; that once attained, all other influences are conservative
in their character. The Cantons of Unterwalden, Schwytz, Glarus, and
Appenzell retain to-day the simple, primitive forms of democracy which
had their origin in the spirit of the people nearly six hundred years
ago.

Twice had I looked up to the little mountain republic from the lower
lands to the northward, with the desire and the determination to climb
one day the green buttresses which support it on every side; so, when I
left St. Gall on a misty morning, in a little open carriage, bound for
Trogen, it was with the pleasant knowledge that a land almost unknown to
tourists lay before me. The only summer visitors are invalids, mostly
from Eastern Switzerland and Germany, who go up to drink the whey of
goats' milk; and, alt