and then, when remembering that upon what they did now the fate of their posterity depended, each looked upon his friend, consoled.  And Walther Fuerst, Werner Stauffacher, and Arnold an der Halden of Melchthal lifted their hands to heaven, and, in the name of God, who created emperor and peasant with the inalienable rights of man, swore to maintain their freedom; and when the thirty heard this, each one raised his hand and swore the same by God and the Saints;—­and then each went his way to his hut, and was silent, and wintered his cattle.

In the mean while it happened that the Bailiff Hermann Gessler was shot dead by Wilhelm Tell, who was of Buerglen, at the entrance of the Schaechenthal, a half-hour from Altorf, in Uri,—­son-in-law of Walther Fuerst, and a man of some substance, for he had the steward-ship in fee in Buerglen of the Frauenmuester Abbey in Zuerich,—­one of the conspirators.  Out of wanton tyranny, or suspicious of the breaking out of disturbances, Gessler determined to discover who bore the joke most impatiently; and, after the symbolical way of the times and the people, set up a hat, (it was on the 18th of November,) to represent the dignity of the Duke Albrecht of Austria, and commanded all to do it homage.  The story of Tell’s refusal, and of the apple placed on the head of his son to be shot at, the world knows far and wide.  Convinced by his success that God was with him, Tell confessed, that, if the matter had gone wrong, he would have had his revenge upon the Bailiff.  Gessler did not dare to detain him in Uri, on account of Tell’s many friends and relations, but took him up the lake, contrary to the traditions of the people, which forbade foreign imprisonment.  They had not got far beyond the Ruetli, when the foehn-wind, breaking loose from the gulfs of the Gothard, threw the waves into a rage, and the rocks echoed with its angry cries.  In this moment of deadly danger, Gessler commanded them to unbind Tell, who, he knew, was an excellent boatman; and as they passed by the foot of the Axen Mountain, to the right as you come out of the Bay of Uri, Tell grasped his bow and leaped upon a flat rock there, climbed up the mountain while the boat tossed to and fro against the rocks, and fled through the land of the men of Schwyz.  But the Bailiff escaped the storm also, and landed by Kuessnacht, where he fell with Tell’s arrow through him.

It should be remembered that this was Tell’s deed alone:  the hour which the people had agreed upon for their deliverance had not come; they had no part in the death of Gessler.  Carlyle has remarked this as appearing also in Schiller’s drama, in the construction of which, he says, “there is no connection, or a very slight one, between the enterprise of Tell and that of the men of Ruetli.”  It was not a deed conformable to law or the highest ethics, yet it was one which mankind is ever ready to forgive and applaud; and the echo of it through the ages will die away only when hatred of tyranny