ches. Materials, indeed, are many relating to the events
that befell the Waldstaette during their conflicts with the bailies,
whom they succeeded in expelling from their country; and it seems in the
highest degree improbable that, had Tell and his friends lived and taken
so prominent a part in effecting their country's freedom as is popularly
assigned to them, they should have been entirely ignored by all
contemporary writers, as well as by subsequent ones, for a hundred and
fifty or two hundred years--yet such is the case.

William Tell is supposed to have performed his heroic deeds in or about
the year 1291, and not till between 1467 and 1474 are his acts recorded,
when in a collection of the traditions of the Canton of Unterwalden,
transcribed by a notary at Sarnen, an account is given of the apple
episode and the subsequent escape of the famous archer, and his murder
of Gessler, though nothing is said of his having taken part in a league
to free his country or of his being the founder of the confederation. A
little prior to the compilation of the _White Book of Sarnen_, as this
collection is called, an anonymous poet composed a _Song of the Origin
of the Confederation_, in which, although no reference is made to
Gessler, the other details are related concerning William Tell shooting
at the apple, the revolt of the peasants, the expulsion of the bailies,
and the formation of a patriotic league. It is, of course, quite
possible that a Gessler was killed by the peasants, as the name was
common enough at the time, but no member of that family--the records of
which have now been most carefully traced--held any office under the
Austrians at that period in any of the Waldstaette, nor is it at all
probable that Austrian bailies governed the districts later than 1231.
Neither is it possible for a bailie named Gessler to have occupied the
castle at the date assigned, the ruins of which have so long been
pointed out as being those of his former abode. So, also, the celebrated
Tell's Chapel on the Vier Waldstaette See, at Kuesnach, was certainly
not built to commemorate the exploits of Schiller's and Rossini's Swiss
hero.

"The fact is that in Gessler we are confronted by a curious case of
confusion in identity. At least three totally different men seem to have
been blended into one in the course of an attempt to reconcile the
different versions of the three cantons. Felix Hammerlin, of Zurich, in
1450, tells of a Hapsburg gov