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It is about five or six thousand feet high, and it stands right up and along the northern shore of the lake of Brienz. I began the ascent. Spongy meads, that soughed under the feet and grew steeper as one rose, took up the first few hundred feet. Little rivulets of mere dampness ran in among the under moss, and such very small hidden flowers as there were drooped with the surfeit of moisture.

Ever upward, by but above the waters of the rapid Brienz, until at the fortress of Mühlbach we entered the Pusterthal proper. This old fort commands the valley and spans the road. Our driver, who, according to Austrian regulation, went on foot wherever the ascent was particularly steep, could not enter into our admiration of its romantic position.

You will observe that the straight way to Rome cuts the Lake of Brienz rather to the eastward of the middle, and then goes slap over Wetterhorn and strikes the Rhone Valley at a place called Ulrichen.

We drove sullenly through Brienz, dead to the seductions of its bewildering array of Swiss carvings and the clamorous HOO-hooing of its cuckoo clocks, and had not entirely recovered our spirits when we rattled across a bridge over the rushing blue river and entered the pretty town of Interlaken. It was just about sunset, and we had made the trip from Lucerne in ten hours.

Situated between two lovely lakes, surrounded by wooded heights, and lying but a few miles from the snowy Jungfrau, it is like a jewel richly set. From Lucerne over the Brunig, from Meiringen over the Grimsel come the travelers, passing on their way the Lake of Brienz, with the waterfall of the Giessbach, on its southern side.

We drove sullenly through Brienz, dead to the seductions of its bewildering array of Swiss carvings and the clamorous HOO-hooing of its cuckoo clocks, and had not entirely recovered our spirits when we rattled across a bridge over the rushing blue river and entered the pretty town of Interlaken. It was just about sunset, and we had made the trip from Lucerne in ten hours.

Dispatches immediately went forth to Obwalden and Uri for priests, and several were conducted by the country people of the Five Cantons, yea, by the very magistrates, with drums and fifes to Hasle and Brienz; and mass was again celebrated amid great rejoicing. What should the government do?

But I could get no one in Brienz to agree with me, because no one thought I had done it, though several people there could talk French. The Grimsel Pass is the valley of the Aar; it is also the eastern flank of that great massif, or bulk and mass of mountains called the Bernese Oberland. I call them 'lumps', because they are so very broad and tortuous in their plan that they are hardly ranges.

Having made myself quite clear that I had a formed plan to go over the Grimsel by the new road, then up over the Gries, where there is no road at all, and so down into the vale of the Tosa, and having calculated that on the morrow I should be in Italy, I started out from Brienz after eating a great meal, it being then about midday, and I having already, as you know, crossed the Brienzer Grat since dawn.

The beautiful Giesbach Fall is near Interlaken, on the other side of the lake of Brienz, and is illuminated every night with those gorgeous theatrical fires whose name I cannot call just at this moment. This was said to be a spectacle which the tourist ought by no means to miss. I was strongly tempted, but I could not go there with propriety, because one goes in a boat.