It came at last to insulting their wives and daughters; and the first man that attempted this, one Wolfenschiess, was struck dead by an angry husband; and when the brave wife of Stauffacher reflected how her turn might come next, she persuaded her husband to anticipate the danger.  Werner Stauffacher at once crossed the lake to Uri, to consult with his friend Walther, Prince of Attinghausen, with whom he found concealed a young man of courage and understanding.  “He is an Unterwaldner from the Melchthal,” said Walther; “his name is Erni an der Halden, and he is a relation of mine; for a trifling matter Landenberg has fined him a couple of oxen; his father Henry complained bitterly of the loss, whereupon a servant of the Bailiff said, ’If the peasants want to eat bread, they can draw their own plough’; at which Erni took fire, and broke one of the fellow’s fingers with his stick, and then took refuge here; meanwhile the Bailiff has caused his father’s eyes to be put out.”  And then the two friends took counsel together; and Walther bore witness how the venerable Lord of Attinghausen had said that these Bailiffs were no longer to be endured.  What desolating wrath resistance would bring upon the Waldstaette they knew and measured, and swore that death was better than an unrighteous yoke.  And they parted, each to sound his friends,—­appointing as a place of conference the Ruetli.  It is a little patch of meadow, which the precipices seem to recede expressly to form, on the Bay of Uri, sloping down to the water’s edge,—­so called from the trees being rooted out (ausgereutet) there,—­not far from the boundary between Unterwalden and Uri, where the Mytenstein rises solitary like an obelisk out of the water.  There, in the stillness of night, they often met together for council touching the work which was to be done; thither by lonely paths came Fuerst and Melchthal, Stauffacher in his boat, and from Unterwalden his sister’s son, Edelknecht of Rudenz.  The more dangerous the deed, the more solemn the bond which bound them.

On the night of Wednesday before Martinmas, on the 10th of November, 1307, Fuerst, Melchthal, and Stauffacher brought each from his own Canton ten upright men to the Ruetli, to deliberate honestly together.  And when they came there and remembered their inherited freedom, and the eternal brotherly bond between them, consecrated by the danger of the times, they feared neither Albrecht nor the power of Austria; and they took each other by the hand, and said, that “in these matters no one was to act after his own fancy; no one was to desert another; that in friendship they would live and die; each was so to strive to preserve the ancient rights of the people that the Swiss through all time might taste of this friendship; neither should the property or the rights of the Count of Hapsburg be molested, nor the Bailiffs or their servants lose one drop of blood; but the freedom which their fathers gave them they would bequeath to their children”: