II. MONT VELAN 511

thus,” says M. Gaullieur, “that the heroic history of old Zurich, and the annals of Thurgovie and Rhétie, are full of the memorable acts of the Emperor of the West, and among other traditions the foundation of the Water-church, (Wasserkirche,) at Zurich, attaches itself to the sight of a marvellous serpent who came to ask justice of the Emperor, in a place where he gave it to all his subjects, by the Limmat shore.”¹

37. I pause here a moment to note that there used to be indeed harmless water serpents in the Swiss waters, when perfectly pure. I myself saw those of the Lac de Chêde, in the year 1833, and had one of them drawn out of the water by the char-a-banc driver with his whip, that I might see the yellow ring round its neck. The colour of the body was dark green. If the reader will compare the account given in Eagle’s Nest² of one of the serpents of the Giessbach, he will understand at once how easily the myths of antiquity would attach themselves among the Alps, as much to the living serpent as to the living eagle.

Also, let the reader not that the beryl-coloured water of the Lake of Zurich and the Limmat gave, in old days, the perfectest type of purity, of all the Alpine streams.³ The deeper blue of the Reuss and Rhone grew dark at less depth, and always gave some idea of the presence of a mineral element, causing the colour; while the Aar had soiled itself with clay even before reaching Berne. But the pale aquamarine crystal of the Lake of Zurich, with the fish set in it, some score of them-small and great-to a cube fathom, and the rapid fall and stainless ripple of the Limmat, through the whole of its course under the rocks of Baden to the Reuss, remained, summer and winter, of a constant, sacred, inviolable, supernatural loveliness.

By the shore of the Limmat then, sate Charlemagne to do justice, as Canute by the sea:-the first “Water

¹ [See Gaullieur’s Suisse Historique, p. 77.]

² [In § 101: see Vol. XXII. p. 196.]

³ [Compare the Preface to the second edition of Sesame and Lilies (1865), Vol. XVIII. p. 29.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]