Excerpt from The Pilgrim in the Shadow of the Jungfrau Alp I wish all my readers a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. May their holidays be graced with good cheer, and what is infinitely better, may the grace of Him, whose love gives us our true holidays, make every heart a temple of gratitude and holy joy. A Pilgrim may wander all over the earth, and find no spot in the world, where men are bound to God by so many ties of mercy, as we are in our own dear native country, or where old and young, rich and poor, have so much cause for heartfelt rejoicing. Therefore, an American, wherever he goes in the world, should go with the feeling that his own country is the best in the world. Not as a proud feeling, let him carry it, but a gentle one, a quiet feeling behind all other moods and varieties of thought, like the sense of domestic happiness, which makes a man sure that his own home is the sweetest of all homes. So, wherever an American goes, the image of his country, like a lake among the mountains, should, as a mirror, receive and reflect the world's surrounding imagery. He should see all other countries in the light of his own. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.