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.

When I came into view of Guttannen, the first village of any considerable
extent that I passed after seeing the Rhone Glacier and the wildnesses of
the Grimsel and Haslithal, where no houses except hotels, and in some