gned
the consulate at Lyons, which was given him solely "to avoid the
appearance of going over to the enemy" while abroad. A carriage and two
servitors were engaged. One of these, Caspar, had his soldiering under
the first Napoleon, and many were the camp tales he had to tell in a way
to please his employers. At the old town of Alstetten, with painted
wooden houses at the foot of the Am Stoss, they arrived, more than ready
for breakfast, which was somewhat delayed because, said Cooper, "our
German was by no means classical; and English, Italian, and French were
all Hebrew to the good people of the inn." It was "easy to make the
hostess understand that we _wished_ to eat,--but _what_ would we eat? In
this crisis I bethought me of a long-neglected art, and crowed like a
cock. The shrill strain hardly reached the ear of the good woman before
it was answered by such laughter as none but village lungs could raise.
William--an admirable mimic--began to cackle like a hen. In due time we
had a broiled fowl, an _omelette_, and boiled eggs." At another place
where they stopped for mid-day luncheon Cooper writes: "We asked for a
fruit-tart, and--odors and nosegays!--they gave us one made of onions,
which they thought very good fruit in its way, and we ate exactly as
much as we wished."

[Illustration: FALL OF THE STAUBBACH.]

"The baths of Pfaeffer," he wrote "in my own unworthy person have wrought
a sudden and wondrous cure"; and of his visit to the Devil's Bridge over
the Reuss: "We entered a gorge between frightful rocks, where the river
was fretting and struggling to get in before us." From the yawning mouth
of a gloomy cave came the tinkling bells of pack-horses to Italy by the
St. Gothard. To the roar of the river and the rushing of winds without
they plunged through this dark "Hole of Uri," which brought them to a
rugged rock-rift pass with but a thread of heaven's blue far above them;
and here "a slight, narrow bridge of a single arch spanned the gorge
with a hardihood that caused one to shudder." Its slender, unrailed,
fifteen feet of width was eighty of span, and one hundred above the
boiling torrent that fell on broken rocks below, and over it; wrote
Cooper: "The wind blew so furiously that I really wished for a rope to
hold on by. This was the far-famed Devil's Bridge; other bridges may
have been built by imps, but Beelzebub himself had a hand in this."

[Illustration: THE DEVIL'S BRIDGE.]

[Illustration: FERNEY, V