on a level the seats tilt at an angle which renders
it almost impossible to use them. But when the start is made the
frightful tilt places the body in an upright position, and, with the
engine in the rear, the train starts up the hill with an easy, gliding
motion, passing up the ascent, somewhat steeper than the roof of a
house, without the slightest apparent effort. But if the going up
excites tremor, much more peculiar are the feelings aroused on the down
grade. The trip begins with a gentle descent, and all at once the
traveler looking ahead sees the road apparently come an end. On a nearer
approach he is undeceived and observes before him a long decline which
appears too steep even to walk down. Involuntarily he catches at the
seats, expecting a great acceleration of speed. Very nervous are his
feelings as the train approaches this terrible slope, but on coming to
the incline the engine dips and goes on not a whit faster than before
and not more rapidly on the down than on the up grade. Many people are
made sick by the sensation of falling experienced on the down run. Some
faint, and a few years ago one traveler, supposed to be afflicted with
heart disease, died of fright when the train was going over the
Schnurtobel bridge. The danger is really very slight, there not having
been a serious accident since the road was opened. The attendants are
watchful, the brakes are strong, but even with all these safeguards, men
of the steadiest nerves cannot help wondering what would become of them
in case anything went wrong.

Bold as was the project of a railroad on the Rigi, a still bolder scheme
was broached ten years later, when a daring genius proposed a railroad
up Mt. Vesuvius. A railroad up the side of an ordinary mountain seemed
hazardous enough, but to build a line on the slope of a volcano, which
in its eruption had buried cities, and every few years was subject to a
violent spasm, seemed as hazardous as to trust the rails of an ordinary
line to the rotten river ice in spring time. The proposal was not,
however, so impracticable as it looked. While the summit of Vesuvius
changes from time to time from the frequent eruptions, and varies in
height and in the size of the crater, the general slope and contour of
the mountain are about the same to-day as when Vesuvius, a wooded hill,
with a valley and lake in the center of its quiescent crater, served as
the stronghold of Spartacus and his rebel gladiators. There have been