TEN YEARS' ALPINE TRAVEL (1774-84) 163 



with a shepherd on his knees, who offers them a nosegay. Such a 

 group would make an agreeable foreground for my mountains, and 

 perhaps I shall ask you to make me one, but you must find some- 

 thing less civilised than a fan, for the shepherdesses of the Grimsel 

 and the Upper Valais are very far from using fans. . . .' 



The drawings here referred to must, I think, be the originals 

 of the two illustrations of the gorge of Schollenen in vol. iv. of the 

 Voyages, which have no artist's name attached to them. If this 

 be so, de Saussure was obviously right in recognising that his 

 artistic powers were limited. The rocks represented in these 

 woodcuts are such as we associate with the theatre rather than 

 with nature. 



At Altdorf de Saussure was welcomed by M. Miiller, a former 

 Landamman of Uri, whose large and luxuriously appointed house 

 seemed to him out of place in the little mountain town. The 

 Genevese traveller's republican sentiment was stirred at finding 

 himself in the cradle of freedom, and he grows eloquent on the 

 virtue of the heroes of the Forest Cantons. Of the Tell legend 

 he expresses no doubt, though it had already been prematurely 

 called in question by an audacious Bernese writer, who had 

 suffered prosecution for his unpatriotic scepticism. The high 

 political morality of the Landesgemeinde, or popular assembly, 

 he illustrates by an entertaining anecdote. The wealthier mem- 

 bers of the community were compelled by law to lend a part 

 of their capital at a fixed rate of interest to their less well-to- 

 do neighbours. Some local radicals, quoting Scripture to prove 

 that this was wicked usury, and therefore contrary to sound 

 religion, proposed that the interest hitherto paid should be 

 counted as instalments towards the repayment of the original 

 debt. The popular assembly not only rejected the proposal 

 with scorn, but permanently disenfranchised those who had 

 made themselves responsible for it. 



De Saussure rowed in eight hours from Fliielen to Lucerne, 

 but he finds little to say of the scenery of the lake ; the structure 

 of the neighbouring mountains, and particularly of the Rigi 

 (which he did not climb), was what interested him. At Lucerne 

 he was on several occasions the guest of M. Pfyffer, an ex-officer 

 of a Swiss regiment serving in France, who spent most of his 

 leisure in constructing a model on a large scale of this part of the 



