for three months, at the sum of five francs a day!  It was inconceivable, it was unheard of!  The Englander was as mad as Gottlieb, whose intellect had always been under suspicion!  The schoolmaster pursed up his lips, the pastor shook his head; no good could come of it; the family looked upon it as another freak of Gottlieb’s, but there was one big mouth less to feed and more room in the kitchen, and they let him go.  They parted from him as ungraciously as they had endured his presence.

Then followed two months of sunshine in Rutli’s life—­association with his beloved plants, and the intelligent sympathy and direction of a cultivated man.  Even in altitudes so dangerous that they had to take other and more experienced guides, Rutli was always at his master’s side.  That savant’s collection of Alpine flora excelled all previous ones; he talked freely with Rutli of further work in the future, and relaxed his English reserve so far as to confide to him that the outcome of their collection and observation might be a book.  He gave a flower a Latin name, in which even the ignorant and delighted Rutli could distinguish some likeness to his own.  But the book was never compiled.  In one of their later and more difficult ascents they and their two additional guides were overtaken by a sudden storm.  Swept from their feet down an ice-bound slope, Rutli alone of the roped-together party kept a foothold on the treacherous incline.  Here this young Titan, with bleeding fingers clenched in a rock cleft, sustained the struggles and held up the lives of his companions by that precious thread for more than an hour.  Perhaps he might have saved them, but in their desperate efforts to regain their footing the rope slipped upon a jagged edge of outcrop and parted as if cut by a knife.  The two guides passed without an outcry into obscurity and death; Rutli, with a last despairing exertion, dragged to his own level his unconscious master, crippled by a broken leg.

Your true hero is apt to tell his tale simply.  Rutli did not dwell upon these details, nor need I. Left alone upon a treacherous ice slope in benumbing cold, with a helpless man, eight hours afterwards he staggered, half blind, incoherent, and inarticulate, into a “shelter” hut, with the dead body of his master in his stiffened arms.  The shelter-keepers turned their attention to Rutli, who needed it most.  Blind and delirious, with scarce a chance for life, he was sent the next day to a hospital, where he lay for three months, helpless, imbecile, and unknown.  The dead body of the Englishman was identified, and sent home; the bodies of the guides were recovered by their friends; but no one knew aught of Rutli, even his name.  While the event was still fresh in the minds of those who saw him enter the hut with the body of his master, a paragraph appeared in a Berne journal recording the heroism of this nameless man.  But it could not be corroborated nor explained by the demented hero, and was presently forgotten.