The weather and the temperature changes very suddenly among the high Alps.  The climate in the valleys of Switzerland is as warm as ours, in summer, while some thousand feet higher lie the everlasting glaciers.  From these, avalanches of cold air precipitate into the valleys, so that the mercury often falls from 20 to 30 degrees in ten minutes!  One is in danger of taking “a cold” every day in Switzerland.

Besides “The Alps” and the lovely lakes among them, the tourist may also see castles, museums, art galleries, pleasure gardens, &c., in Switzerland, but I will only enumerate a few of the most striking objects that I met and saw in this curious country, and then pass on to Italy.

One of the bridges of Lucerne is adorned with very curious paintings representing the “Dance of Death.”  Scores of skeletons, some blowing the bugle or playing with the triangles, others equipped with hoes and spades, are jubilant over their work!

One of the finest organs in Europe is the far-famed one at Freiburg, having 67 stops and 7,800 pipes, some of them 33 feet long.  This instrument has such a range of volume that it can simulate the roaring thunder as well as the faintest echo.  The portal of the same cathedral which contains the famous organ is also adorned (?) with a curious representation of the last judgment.  St. Peter leads the blessed to the door of Heaven, but half a dozen evil ones busy themselves in disposing of the wicked.  One of them that has a head like a hog, carries them from the scales into a large caldron where they are boiled.  Others with forks in their hands pitch them into the mouth of the large dragon-devil who is represented as glutting them, and whose capacious mouth admits of several of them at a time!  The time has almost arrived when one may no longer describe what he sees in the churches of Europe!  This reminds me of a monster that stands upon a fountain in Bern, called the Kindlifresser, (the Ogre), who is in the act of eating a child, while others doomed to the same fate protrude from his girdle and pockets!

Berne is a great place for bears.  Besides those connected with the curious machinery of the clock on one of its clock-towers, among the dead bears, they also keep a large den of living bears at the expense of the government.  The bear is the heraldic emblem of Switzerland, as is our eagle of American freedom.

Of the fictitous hero, William Tell, and the nature and character of the Swiss Republic, I can not say more in the compass of this book, than that the former is a myth and that the latter was in a great measure the outgrowth of poverty.

The reader may form an idea of the miserable dwellings of the peasantry on the mountains, when he is told that many are hardly distinguishable from the stables in which the cattle are sheltered.