ernor swearing vengeance against Tell, and laying plans
with his followers how the runaway should be seized. The deepest dungeon
at Kuessnach, he vowed, should be his lot.

He little dreamed what ears heard his fulminations and what deadly peril
threatened him. On leaving the boat, Tell had run quickly forward to the
passage, or hollow way, through which he knew that Gessler must pass on
his way to the castle. Here, hidden behind the high bank that bordered
the road, he waited, cross-bow in hand, and the arrow which he had
designed for the governor's life in the string, for the coming of his
mortal foe.

Gessler came, still talking of his plans to seize Tell, and without a
dream of danger, for the pass was silent and seemed deserted. But
suddenly to his ears came the twang of the bow he had heard before that
day; through the air once more winged its way a steel-barbed shaft, the
heart of a tyrant, not an apple on a child's head, now its mark. In an
instant more Gessler fell from his horse, pierced by Tell's fatal shaft,
and breathed his last before the eyes of his terrified servants. On that
spot, the chronicler concludes, was built a holy chapel, which is
standing to this day.

Such is the far-famed story of William Tell. How much truth and how much
mere tradition there is in it, it is not easy to say. The feat of
shooting an apple from a person's head is told of others before Tell's
time, and that it ever happened is far from sure. But at the same time
it is possible that the story of Tell, in its main features, may be
founded on fact. Tradition is rarely all fable.

We are now done with William Tell, and must return to the doings of the
three confederates to whom fame ascribes the origin of the liberty of
Switzerland. In the early morning of January 1, 1308, the date they had
fixed for their work to begin, as Landenberg was leaving his castle to
attend mass at Sarnen, he was met by twenty of the mountaineers of
Unterwald, who, as was their custom, brought him a new-year's gift of
calves, goats, sheep, fowls, and hares. Much pleased with the present,
he asked the men to take the animals into the castle court, and went on
his way towards Sarnen.

But no sooner had the twenty men passed through the gates than a horn
was loudly blown, and instantly each of them drew from beneath his
doublet a steel blade, which he fixed upon the end of his staff. At the
sound of the horn thirty other men rushed from a neighboring wo