[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, VOLTAIRE’S LAZE LEMAN HOME.]

They enjoyed the beauty of Lake Geneva, and were charmed by the attractions of “Ferney,” Voltaire’s home on Leman’s shore, and enjoyed the solemn gorge-valley of the Rhone, and through the Simplon passed into fair Italy.  As they “drew near a small chapel in a rock Casper flourished his whip, calling out the word ‘Italia!’ I pulled off my hat in reverence,” wrote the author.  Down the steep mountains, over bridged torrents, past the hill-towns and valley-lands, they came to the City of the Lily,—­fair Florence of the Arno.  “As early as 1829,” Cooper thought, “the unification of Italy was irresistible.”

[Illustration:  THE SIMPLON PASS.]

[Illustration:  FLORENCE, ITALY.]

[Illustration:  PALAZZO RICASOLI, FLORENCE, ITALY.]

In Florence a home was soon found in the Palazzo Ricasoli, Via del Cocomero.  Lofty of ceiling—­twenty feet—­was their apartment, in which they enjoyed “two noble bed-rooms, several smaller ones, a large drawing-room, dining-room, baths, a small court and garden within the iron gates, and all for the modest sum of sixty dollars per month.”  The oil burned in their lamps the home-folk “would be happy to use on their salads.”  Here, around the cheering glow of great wood-fires, the American author would gather his friends, old and new.  From Otsego days a blazing hearth-stone ever rejoiced his cheery nature, and his way of laying the wood and nursing the flames horrified his Italian servants as waste of fuel.  The chill of the tra montana brought into this circle of warmth and light many eminent foreigners; and of home-country folk, that true American, Horatio Greenough, often basked in the bright glow of the author’s wood-fires at Florence.