PASS OF SAINT GOTHARD.
The Priest's Leap--The Devil's Bridge--Night on the
Mountains--Storm--Hospenthal--the Glaciers--a Lady in Distress--the
Furca Pass--Glacier of the Rhone--Heinrich and Nature--Heinrich asks
after God--Scene in the Hospice.
We are now on the great road that leads over the Alps into Italy by the
famous Pass of St. Gothard. The diligence to Milan went off this morning
at nine o'clock, and had we come on in the earliest boat from Lucerne,
we might have been taken on as far as we liked by that lumbering
conveyance. A party of students, seven from Germany, and two from Oxford
joined us, and we resolved to hire a carriage to Amsteg, two hours
onward, and there to begin the ascent and pedestrianism together. The
ride to Amsteg was lively, but when we were set down at that village,
with a walk of five hours before us, all the way up the mountains, I
confess to a slight sinking at the heart; and my courage oozed out
gradually at the end of my toes. At the inn of Altorf, a young German
student attracted me by the gracefulness of his manner, the delicacy of
his features, and the pleasant expression with which he conversed. He
attached himself to our party, and we walked on together, pilgrims to
see Switzerland, and rejoicing in the power to take leave of all modes
of travelling, but that first and best, which nature had provided. The
river Reuss comes dashing along down with the fury of a young torrent,
pouring over rocks, and whirling around precipices with a madness that
brooks no control. The Bristenock mountain towers aloft into the regions
of snow and ice, and nature begins to grow wild and dreary. The soft
meadows on which the maids of Uri were making hay have disappeared, and
the green pastures with frequent herds are now the only hope of the
shepherd. The road is no longer a straight path, but in its toilsome way
upward, it crosses again and again this foaming river, and bridges of
solid masonry, built to resist the flood when it bears the ruins of
avalanches on its bosom, and spreads them in the spring on the plains
below.
We crossed the third bridge and came to a gorge of frightful depth
through which the river rages furiously, in a maddened torrent too
fearful to look on without awe. It is called Pfaffensprung, or the
Priest's Leap, from a story--which no one will believe who stands
here--that a monk once leaped across the chasm with a maiden in his
arms. I have no doubt a monk would do his best under the circumstances,
but I doubt the possibility of his clearing thirty feet at a bound over
such an abyss as this, even for the sake of the prize he is said to have
carried off. We had been beset by beggars under all sorts of guises, and
here a miserable old woman--alas that a woman could come to
this--appeared with a huge stone in her hands, which she hurled into the
deeps, for us to see it leap from rock to rock and finally sink into the
raging waters far below. A few cents she expected for this service, and
she received them with gratitude; when an old man, perhaps her husband,
came on with another rock which he was willing to drop for a similar
consideration. As I turned away from the scene, a carriage came up in
which an English gentleman was riding, with two servants on the box. I
walked by the side of his carriage and fell into conversation, when he
very politely invited me to ride with him. I declined of course, and
told him that I was making a pedestrian tour, and designed to walk to
Andermatt, three hours and a half farther up the mountain. "I spend the
night there also," he said, "and I will esteem it an honor, Sir, if you
will take a seat in my carriage." Such an invitation, under the
circumstances, was not to be refused, and I took a seat by the
gentleman's side. How wonderfully the scenery improved, certainly how
much my appreciation of it increased, when I fell back on the cushions!
My companion was an accomplished member of the London bar. He knew
public men whom I had met, and was well acquainted with all subjects of
international interest, so that in fifteen minutes we were comparing
minds on those questions in which England and America are so much
concerned. We stopped at the little village of Wasen for refreshments. I
insisted on paying the reckoning, when he stopped me with this remark,
"Sir, you are my guest to-day: when I meet you in America I shall be
happy to be yours."
We rode on and upward, the road now assuming the character of a mighty
structure of mason work through a savage defile, only wide enough for
the carriage-path, and the torrent of the Reuss, which no longer flows,
but tumbles headlong from one cliff to another, while for three or four
miles the lofty precipices hang fearfully on high. In the spring, the
rage of this mountain river, swollen by melting snows, and bringing down
ice and rocks in its thundering fall, would tear away the foundations of
any common pathway, and this must be built to defy the fiercest storm.
Twenty-five or thirty thousand persons cross the Alps by this route
every year; and to secure this travel, which would otherwise be carried
off to the other passes, the cantons of Uri and Tessin built a road
which has twice been swept away by the avalanches, but one would think
that the present might stand while the mountains stand. So rapid is the
ascent, that the road is made often to double on itself, so that we are
going directly backward on the route; a foot passenger may clamber
across the doublets and save his time, but the carriage must keep the
zig-zag way, patiently toiling up a smoother and more beautiful highway
than can be found in the most level region of the United States of
America! Not a pebble in the path: the wheels meet no other obstruction
than gravitation, which is sufficient to be overcome only by the
strongest of horse power. Yet through this very defile, long before any
road like this had been built, three armies, the French and the Russians
and the Austrians, have pursued each other, contesting every inch of
this ground, and each one of these rugged heights, and disputing the
possession of dizzy cliffs where the hunter was afraid to tread. Never
did the feeling of Nature's awful wildness so take possession of my
soul, as when night was shutting in upon me in this dreary pass.
Sometimes the road is hewn out of the solid rock in the side of the
precipice, which hangs over it as a roof, and again it is borne over the
roaring stream, which in a gulf four hundred feet below is boiling in
its obstructed course, and making for itself an opening, it leaps away
over the rocks, and rushes down while we are toiling up. In the day-time
it would be gloomy here; it will be terrible indeed if the darkness
overtakes us before we reach our resting-place for the night.
More than five hundred years ago an old Abbot of Einsiedeln built a
bridge over an awful chasm here, but such is the fury of the descending
stream, the horrid ruggedness of the surrounding scenery, the smoothness
and solidity of the impending rocks, the roar and rage of the waters as
they are tossed about and beaten into spray, and so unlikely does it
appear that human power could ever have reared a bridge over such a
cataract, that it has been called from time immemorial the Devil's
Bridge, and so it will be called probably till the end of time. It was
just nightfall when we reached it. It was very cold, so far up had we
ascended. We had left the carriage and were walking to quicken the
blood, when the roar of the waters rose suddenly upon us, the spray
swept over us, and we were in the midst of a scene of such awful
grandeur, and with terror mingled, as might well make the nerves of a
strong man tremble. The river Reuss, at this stage of its course, makes
a sweeping leap, a tremendous plunge at the very moment it bends nearly
in a semi-circle, while the rocks, as if by some superhuman energy, have
been hurled into the torrent's path, so as to break its fall, but not to
withstand its power. Two bridges are here--for when the old road was
swept away, the bridge defied the storm, and this one, more solid and of
far greater span, has been thrown high above the other which is left as
an architectural curiosity in the depths below. And long before that was
built, another one was there, and when the French in 1799 pursued the
Austrians over it, and while the embattled hosts were making hell in a
furious fight upon and over this frightful gorge, the bridge was blown
up, and the struggling foes were whelmed together in the devouring
flood. A month afterwards, and the Russians met the French at the same
spot--no bridge was here, but the fierce Russians bound timbers together
with the scarfs of the officers, threw them over the chasm, crossed in
the midst of a murderous fire, and drove the enemy down the Pass into
the vales below.
[Illustration: THE DEVIL'S BRIDGE.]
It was dark before we were willing to quit this fearful place. The
strength of the present bridge is so obvious, and the parapet so high,
that the scene may be contemplated without fear; but the clouds had now
gathered, hoarse thunder muttered among the mountains, spiteful squalls
of rain, cold, gloomy, and piercing, were driving into our faces, and we
were anxious to find shelter for the night. We left the Bridge, but in
another moment plunged into utter darkness as we entered a tunnel called
the _Hole of Uri_, where the road is bored one hundred and eighty feet
through the solid rock, a hard but the only passage, as the stream
usurps the rest of the way, and the precipice admits no possible path
over its lofty head. This was made a hundred and fifty years ago, and
before that time the passage was made on a shelf supported by chains let
down from above. It was called the Gallery of Uri, and along it a single
traveller could creep, if he had the nerve, in the midst of the roar and
the spray of the torrent, and with an hungry gulph yawning wide below
him.--Emerging from this den, we entered a valley five thousand feet
above the sea; once doubtless a lake, whence the waters of the Reuss
have burst the barriers of these giant fortresses, and found their way
into more hospitable climes. No corn grows here, but the land flows with
milk and honey--by no means an indication of fertility, for the cows and
the goats find pasture at the foot of the glaciers, and the bees their
nests in the stunted trees and the holes of the rocks. We drove through
it till we came to Andermatt, where the numerous lights in the windows
guided us to a rustic tavern.
By this time it had commenced raining hard, and I began to be anxious
for my young friend Rankin, and a German student, Heinrich. But I could
do no more for them than to send a man to watch in the highway till they
should come up, and lead them into the house where I was resolved to
spend the night, whether we could find beds or not. These rural inns in
Switzerland are rude and often far from comfortable. But travellers here
must not stand upon trifles. The house was designed to lodge twenty
travellers, and thirty at least were here before us. A large supper
table was spread, and around it a company of gentlemen and ladies,
mostly German, were enjoying themselves right heartily, after the day's
fatigue was over. The London lawyer and myself had a separate table laid
for us--we soon gathered on it some of the good things of this life,
which by the way you can find almost every where, and had made some
progress in the discussion of the various subjects before us, when
Rankin and Heinrich arrived nearly exhausted with their toilsome walk.
They had a dreadful tale to tell of the storm they had met--which we
just escaped, and barely that. The lightning filled the gloomy gorge,
lighting up for an instant the mighty cliffs and hanging precipices,
while the thunder roared above the sound of the torrent, and the rain
drove into their faces, disputing with them the upward pass. But they
were young men, and strong. They told me that I never could have borne
the labor and the exposure of the walk. Two travellers and a guide had
given out, and taken lodgings in a hamlet we had passed, and the man
whom we had employed to bring on our light bags, had also halted for the
night, and would come up early in the morning.
After supper I led them to our chamber. Upon my arrival, the landlady
assured me that every bed in the house was full, but I insisted so
strenuously on having _three_, that the girls exchanged looks of
agreement, and one of them offered to show me a chamber, if it would be
acceptable. She led me up three pair of stairs, into a low garret
bed-room, with one window of boards which could be opened, and one small
one of glass that could not, and here were three beds kindly given up by
the young women. Into this chamber I now conducted my young friends.
Worn out with their hard day's work, but free from all anxious care,
they were asleep in five minutes, while I coaxed the candle to burn as
long as it would, fastened it up with a pin on the top of the
candlestick, and tried to write the records of the few past hours. It
was amusing to hear my companions, one on each side of me, talk in their
sleep; Heinrich in his native German, and Rankin in his English, showing
the restlessness of over-fatigue, while I sat wondering at myself, so
lately a poor invalid, now in this wild region, exposed to such nights
of discomfort, and days of toil. Yet was I grateful even there, not only
for a safe shelter and a much better bed than my Master had, but for the
strength to attempt such things, and for the luxury of health that lives
and flows in a genial current through every part of a renovated frame.
In the morning I met an American gentleman returning from the summit of
St. Gothard pass, and he advised me strenuously not to go further up,
unless I was going now into Italy. The most wonderful of the engineering
in the construction of the road, had already been seen, and there was
nothing else of interest above. The same savage scenery, in the midst of
which the Reuss leaps down 2,000 feet in the course of a two hours'
walk, is continued, and the dreariness of desolation reigns alone. A
house for the accommodation of travellers has been maintained for
hundreds of years, destroyed at times and then restored, and a few monks
have been supported here to extend what aid they may to those who
require their assistance. We resolved to pursue a route through the
_Furca_ pass, one of the most romantic and interesting of all the passes
in Switzerland. A long day's walk it would be over frozen mountains and
by the side of never melting glaciers, and no carriage way! Nothing but
a bridle and a foot path, and a rough one too, was now before us, and if
we left the present road, and struck off over the Furca, it would be
four or five days before we should reach the routes which are traversed
by wheels. Our baggage, though but a bag apiece and blankets, was too
heavy for us to carry if we walked, and I proposed to take a horse, put
on him our three bundles, and ride by turns. Heinrich had never heard of
the mode of travelling called "ride and tie," and he was greatly amused
when it was described to him. Accordingly we ordered a horse for the
day. The price is regulated by law, under the pretence of protecting the
traveller, but really for the purpose of extorting from him a sum twice
as large as he would have to pay if the business were open to
competition. The horse was brought to the door, and when we ordered the
bags of three to be strapped on, the landlord flew into a great rage,
and declared he would not be imposed upon. I smiled in his red face, and
asked, "If he knew how much baggage the law allowed each man to carry on
his horse." He said he did, and I then told him to weigh those, and he
might have for his own all over and above the legal allowance. He was
still dissatisfied, but when we bade him to take his old nag to the
stable, he suddenly cooled. Without further delay he made fast "the
traps," gave me a good stout fellow to conduct the party and bring back
the beast. An idle group of guides and tavern hangers, and quite a party
of Germans and English were looking on when I bestrode the animal, and
took my seat in the midst of the bundles rising before and behind, like
the humps of a camel. We are yet in the vale of the Urseren, not more
than a mile wide, and lofty mountains flanking its sides. The mountain
of St. Anne is clad with a glacier, from which the "thunderbolts of
snow" come down with terrific power in the spring, and yet there stands
a forest in the form of a triangle, pointing upward, and so placed that
the slides of snow as they come down are broken in pieces and guided
away from the village below. The great business of the people in this
vale is to keep cattle and to fleece the strangers who travel in throngs
over the pass of St. Gothard. Hundreds of horses are kept for hire, and
nothing is to be had by a "foreigner" unless he pays an exorbitant
price. Even the specimens of minerals are held so high, that no
reasonable man can afford to buy them. But we are now leaving Andermatt,
and on the side of the road not long after leaving the village we saw
two stone pillars, which need but a beam to be laid across them, and
they make a gallows, on which criminals were formerly hung, when this
little valley, like Gersau on the lake, was an independent state. The
pillars are still preserved with care, as a memorial of the former
sovereignty of the community.
We reached _Hospenthal_ in a few moments; a cluster of houses about a
church, and with a tower above the hamlet which is attributed to the
Lombards. I was struck with the exceeding loneliness and forsakenness of
this spot. It seemed that men had once been here, but had retired from
so wild and barren a land, to some more genial clime. Hospenthal has a
hotel or two, and it is a great halting place for travellers who are
about to take our route over the Furca to the Hospice of the Grimsel.
Here we quit the St. Gothard road, and winding off by a narrow path in
which we can go only in single file, we are soon out of the vale, and
slowly making our way up the mountain. The hill sides are dotted with
the huts of the poor peasants, who have hard work to hold fast to the
slopes with one hand, while they work for a miserable living with the
other. The morning sun was playing on the blue glacier of St. Anne, and
a beautiful waterfall wandered and tumbled down the mountain; yet this
was but one of many of the same kind that we are constantly meeting as
we go through these defiles of the high Alps. The vast masses of snow
and ice on the summits are sending down streams through the Summer, and
these sometimes leap from rock to rock, and again they clear hundreds of
feet at a single bound; slender, like a long white scarf on the green
hill, but very picturesque and beautiful. At the foot of this mountain
are the remains of an awful avalanche, which buried a little hamlet here
in a sudden grave, and a sad story of a maiden and a babe who perished,
was told me with much feeling by the guide as we passed over the spot.
The peasant men and women were bringing down bundles of hay on their
heads and shoulders from the scanty meadows which here and there in a
warm bosom of the hills may be found, and as they descended I recalled
the story of Orpheus, at whose music the trees are said to have followed
him, and I could readily understand that such a procession might be
taken or mistaken for the marching of a young forest. We are still
following up the river Reuss towards its source, and though it is
narrower, it is often fiercer and makes longer strides at a step than it
did last evening. We cross it now and then on occasional stones, or on
rude logs, and come to a spot where the bridge was swept away last night
by an avalanche of earth and ice, and well for us that it came in the
night before we were here to be caught. An old man with a pickaxe in his
hand had been working to repair the crossing, and had managed to get a
few stones arranged so that foot passengers could leap over, and the
horses after slight hesitation and careful sounding of the bottom, took
to the torrent and waded safely over. I held my feet high enough to
escape a wetting, but I heard a lady of another party complaining
bitterly that the water was so deep or her foot so far down, I could not
tell which, but it was evident that very much against her will she had
been drawn through the river.
At Realp, a little handful of houses, we found a small house of
refreshment, where two Capuchin friars reside to minister to travellers,
and this was the last sign of a human habitation we saw for some weary
hours. We are now so far up in the world, that the snow lay in banks by
the side of the path, while flowers, bright beautiful flowers were
blooming in the sun. It is difficult to reconcile this apparent
contradiction in nature. The fact is not surprising here, where we see
such vast accumulations of snow and remember that a short summer does
not suffice to melt it, but it is strange to read of flowery banks all
gay and smiling, within a few feet only of these heaps of snow. I
counted flowers of seven distinct colors, and gathered those that would
press well in my books, souvenirs of this remarkable region. On the
right the Galenstock Glacier now appears, and out of it vast rocks like
the battlements of some old castle shoot 1,000 feet into the air. I am
now among the ice palaces of the earth. The cold winds are sweeping down
upon me, and I hug my coat closer as the ice blast strikes a chill to my
heart.
We were just making the last sharp ascent before reaching the summit of
the Furca when I overtook a lady sitting disconsolately by the wayside.
She cried out as soon as I came up, "O Sir, my guide is such a
brute--the saddle turns under me and I cannot get him to fix it--my
husband has gone on before me--I cannot speak a word of German and the
dumb fool cannot speak a word of English. What shall I do?"
"Madam," said I, "my servant shall arrange your saddle, and I will
conduct you to the summit where the rest of your party will doubtless
wait." She overpowered me with her expressions of gratitude, and while
my servant was putting her saddle girths to rights, I gave her guide the
needful cautions, and we crossed a vast snow bank together, climbed the
steep pitch, and in ten minutes reached the inn at the top of the Furca.
Distant glaciers, snow clad summits, ridges, and ranges stood around me,
a world without inhabitants, desolate, cold and grand in its icy canopy
and hoary robes of snow.
The descent was too rapid and severe for riding, and giving the horse
into the charge of the servant we walked down, discoursing by the way of
things rarely talked of in the Alps. My young German friend had all the
enthusiasm of the French character joined to the mysticism of his own
nation. He is well read in English literature, and familiar with ancient
and modern authors, so that we had sources unfailing, to entertain us as
we wandered on; now sitting down to rest and now bracing ourselves for a
smart walk over a rugged pass. I became intensely interested in him,
though I had constant occasion to challenge his opinions, and especially
to contrast his philosophy with the revealed wisdom of God. We had
spoken of these things for an hour or more when I asked him if he had
ever read "the Pilgrim's Progress," and when I found he had not, I told
him the design of the allegory, and said "we are pilgrims over these
mountains, and have been cheering one another with pleasing discourse as
the travellers did on their way to the celestial city. They came at last
in sight of its gates of pearl."
"But what is that?"
We had suddenly turned the shoulder of a hill, and a glacier of such
splendor and extent burst upon our view as to fix us to the spot in
silent but excited admiration. It was the first we had seen near us.
Others had been lying away in the far heights, their surface smoothed by
the distance, and their color a dull blue; but now we were at the foot
of a mountain of ice! We could stand upon it, walk on its face, gaze on
its form and features, wonder, admire, look above it and adore! This is
the glacier of the Rhone! That great river springs from its bosom, first
with a strong bound as if suddenly summoned into being, works its way
through a mighty cavern of ice, and then winds along the base till it
emerges in a roaring, milky white stream and rushes down the valley
toward the sea. This glacier has been called a "magnificent sea of ice."
It is not so. That description conveys no idea of the stupendous scene.
You have stood in front of the _American_ fall of Niagara. Extend that
fall far up the rapids, receding as it rises a thousand feet or more
from where you stand to the crest: at each side of it let a tall
mountain rise as a giant frame work on which the tableau is to rest;
then suddenly congeal this cataract, with its curling waves, its clouds
of spray, its falling showers of jewelry, point its brow with pinnacles
of ice, and then, then let the bright sun pour on it his beams, giving
the brilliancy not of snow but of polished ice to the vast hill-side now
before you, and you will then have but a faint conception of the
grandeur of this glacier.
"It answers," said Heinrich, "to Burke's definition of the sublime--it
is vast, mysterious, terrible!"
I replied that "it was impossible for me to have the sensation of fear,
and scarcely of awe in looking upon the scene before us--it rather had
to me the image of the outer walls of heaven, as if there must be
infinite glory within and beyond when such majesty and beauty were
without. And then these flowers skirting the borders of this frozen
pile, and smiling as lovely as beneath the sunniest slope in Italy,
forbade the idea that this crystal mountain was of ice."
"But will it not vanish if we look away?" said Heinrich, as he gazed on
the frozen cataracts, and gave utterance to his admiration in the most
expressive words that German, French, English, Latin or Greek would
supply, for our discourse was in a mixture of them all.
Soon after passing the Glacier of the Rhone we met a peasant who assured
us that he had fallen into one of its crevices, seventy feet, and had
cut his way up with a hatchet, thus delivering himself from an icy
grave.
A little wayside inn gave us a brief respite from our toilsome journey.
We climbed the Grimsel, and reached the Dead Sea on its summit. It is
called the Lake of the Dead, because the bodies of those who perished in
making this journey were formerly cast into it for burial. Heinrich and
I left the path and climbed to a cliff where we looked down on the
pilgrim parties on horses and on foot, winding their way along its
borders. We sent our servant onward to engage beds for us at the hospice
of the Grimsel, and resolved to spend the rest of the day (the sun was
yet three hours high) in this wilderness of mountain scenery.
We could now look down into the valley, a little valley, but like an
immense cauldron, the sides of which are sterile naked rocks, eight
hundred feet high! On the west they stand like the walls and towers of a
fortified city, and in the bottom of the vale is a single house and a
small lake; but a flock of a hundred goats and a score of cows, with
tinkling bells, are picking a scanty subsistence among the stones. The
scene was wild, savage, grand indeed, and had there been no sun to light
it up with the lustre of heaven, it would have been dreary and dismal.
Heinrich had been very thoughtful for an hour. He had discovered that my
thoughts turned constantly to the God who made all these mountains,
while he was ever studying the mountains themselves.
"Here I will commune with nature."
I replied, "And I will go on a little further, and commune with God!"
"Stay," he cried, "I would go with you."
"But you cannot see Him," I said--"I see Him in the mountain and the
glacier and the flower: I hear Him in the torrent and the still small
voice of the rills and little waterfalls that are warbling ever in our
ears. I feel his presence and something of his power. I beg you to stay
and commune with nature, while I go and commune with God."
I left him and wandered off alone, and in an hour went down the
mountain, and to my chamber in the hospice. I was sitting on the
bedside, arranging the flowers I had gathered during the day, when
Heinrich entered, and giving me his hand said to me, "I wish you would
speak more to me of God!"
He sat down by my side, and I asked him if he believed the Bible to be
the Word of God.
He said he did, but he would examine it by the light of history and
reason, and reject what he did not find to be true.
"And do you believe that the soul of man will live hereafter?"
"I doubt," was his desponding answer.
I then addressed him tenderly, "My dear young friend, I have loved you
since the hour I met you at Altorf. And now tell me, with all your
studies have you yet learned how to die? You _doubt_, but are you so
well satisfied with your philosophy that you are able to look upon death
among the mountains, or by the lightning, without fear? My faith tells
me that when I die my life and joy will just begin, and go on in glory
forever. This is the source of all my hopes, and it gives me comfort now
when I think that I may never see my native land and those I love on
earth again. I _know_ that in another land we shall meet?"
"How do you know that you shall meet?"
"My faith, my heart, my Bible tells me so. I shall meet all the _good_
in heaven. I am sure of one child, an angel now."
"And where are your children?"
"Four in America, and one in heaven. I had a boy four years ago; earth
never had a fairer. His locks were of gold and hung in rich curls on a
neck and shoulders whiter than the snow: his brow was high and broad
like an infant cherub's; and his eye was blue as the evening sky. And he
was lovelier than he was fair. But in the budding of his beauty, he fell
sick and died."
"O no, not died!"
"Yes, he died here by my heart. And that child is the only one of mine
that I am sure of ever seeing again."
"I do not understand you."
"If my other children grow up to _doubt_ as _you_ doubt, they may wander
away on the mountains of error or the glaciers of vice, and fall into
some awful gulph and be lost forever. And if I do not live to see my
living children, I am as sure of meeting that one now in heaven, as if I
saw him here in the light of the setting sun.--Heinrich, have you a
mother, my dear friend?"
"Yes, yes," he cried, "and her faith is the same as yours."
I had seen his eyes filling, and had felt my own lips quivering as I
spoke, but now he burst into tears and fell on my breast. He kissed my
lips, and my cheeks, and my forehead, and the hot tears rained on my
face, and mingled with my own. "O teach me the way to feel and believe,"
he said at last, as he clung to me like a frightened child, and clasped
me convulsively to his heart. I held him long and tenderly, and felt for
him somewhat, I hope, as Jesus did for the young man who came to him
with a similar inquiry. _I loved him_, and longed to lead him to the
light of day.