er on the self-same spot; and there was she
discovered at nightfall by some fishermen, propped up in a crevice of
the rock, but cold, and scarcely conscious. They all knew her well, and
with the tenderest care they carried her to her cottage. Even before
they reached it, her mind began to wander, and wild and incoherent
words dropped from her. That same night she was seized with fever; the
benevolent but simple people about her knew not what to do; the nearest
medical aid was many miles off; and when it did arrive, on the following
morning, the malady had already attacked the brain.

The same sad, short series of events so many have witnessed, so many
have stood by, with breaking hearts, now occurred. To wild delirium,
with all its terrible excesses, succeeded the almost more dreadful
stupor; and to that again the brief lucid moment of fast-ebbing life;
and then came the sleep that knows no waking--and my mother was at rest!

CHAPTER XXII. THE VILLAGE OF REICHENAU.

I must now ask of my reader to clear at a bound both time and space, and
stand beside me some years later, and in a foreign land.

The scene is at the foot of the Splugen Alps, in a little village begirt
with mountains, every crag and eminence of which is surmounted by a
ruined castle. There is a grandeur and solemnity in the whole landscape,
not alone from its vast proportions, but from the character of
impregnability suggested by those fastnesses and the gray, sad-colored
tint of hill and verdure around.

There is barely space for the# village in the narrow glen, which is
traversed by two streams,--the one, yellow, turbid, and sluggish; the
other, sparkling, bright, and impetuous. These are the Rhines, which,
uniting below the village of Reichenau, form that noble river whose
vine-clad cliffs and castled crags are lyrical in every land of Europe.

I scarcely know a spot throughout the whole Continent more typical of
isolation and retirement than this. There is no entrance to it from the
north, save by a wooden bridge over the torrent; towards the south it
is only accessible by the winding zig-zag of the "Via Mala;" east and
westward rise gigantic mountains untraversed by even the chamois-hunter;
and yet there is no appearance of that poverty and destitution so
usually observable in remote and unvisited tracts. Many of the houses
are large and substantially built, some evince a little architectural
pretension in the way of ornament, and one, whic