angel, but I never could believe that another would do the same, and felt jealous at the thought that Liesli had confided her happiness to his hands and not to mine. My blood rushed to my cheeks; I resolved to set out immediately for the hermitage and should I not succeed by gentle means, the mouth of a loaded pistol presented to his breast should prove a sufficient inducement for him to confess where he had placed my treasure. Simple fool that I was, how had I allowed myself to be duped and misled by his artful sophistry! How must he laugh at my simplicity and inexperience! Who knows what were his views or intentions with respect to the maiden. Age does not always withstand folly: so long as no one had stood in his way he had left the young girl to herself, but now that the unsuspecting creature had, perhaps, in her simplicity betrayed to him her partiality for me, he tears her from my arms, confines her in some subterraneous corner of his hermitage, and retains her there a prisoner until I may have turned my back upon the frontiers of the Canton, which, having once reached, I may then travel as far as I like, seek as long as I please, and torment myself as much as I choose—to him that will be quite immaterial. He will only laugh at me in his sleeve, while Liesli remains his, with all those many thousand charms, which would only have bloomed for me, had not the dissembling monk obtruded himself between us.
With the dawn of day I stood before the door of the hermitage. I knocked, pushed, and stamped, calling out a thousand times the name of Liesli—but in vain, no answer was returned, not a sound was heard. At length a herdsman’s boy, attracted by the noise I made, descended from the mountain above, and informed me that the hermit was gone upon a long journey, and, as he had told all his acquaintances in the neighbourhood, would not return for some months.
Liesli was thus then lost to me! There were no means, no hopes of regaining her! Switzerland had now no longer any charms for me; I had climbed enough amongst her mountains and glaciers; I was as weary of sailing along her beau-
