It took me part of two days to climb over.

Near the top of the Simplon Pass is a house called a hospice where I once spent the night. It is a house where certain priests, called monks, live, and the reason the hospice was built there and the reason the monks live there is to provide a shelter for travelers and a place where they may rest safely in case they should be caught in a storm.

Few people now cross the pass, for it is so easy and so quick and so safe to go through the tunnel; but before the tunnel was made underneath there was no other way for people to go from Italy to Switzerland but over the top of the pass, and many people were traveling that way all the time. Snow-storms and blizzards were likely to happen almost any time, summer or winter, and often travelers would be lost and frozen to death. These good monks living in the hospice were the life-savers of the mountain pass. They had built little huts along the mountain pathway and they had large, strong, intelligent dogs called St. Bernards who were trained to go forth from the hospice when there was a storm, and search for travelers who might have been overcome, lost their way, or fallen in the snow. A dog would carry, strapped to his neck, a barrel filled with bread and wine. His sense of smell was so strong he could find a man even though buried in the snow, shake him back to his senses, and drag him to the nearest hut, to wait for food and drink until the storm should stop. The Simplon Hospice is one of the few places in the World where any one, whether he be rich man or poor man, saint or sinner, will be housed for the night, fed, and taken care of for nothing, without question and without charge.

Do you know the story of William Tell·Well, Switzerland has many lakes, but the most beautiful one is called the Lake of Light—Lake Lucerne—and on the shore of Lake Lucerne is a little church marking the spot where William Tell is supposed to have shot the apple off of his young son’s head.