t 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 fri