r sail was visible on the whole of the watery expanse, with the
exception of one that hung lazily from its yard, in a small bark that was
pulling towards St. Gingoulph, bearing Savoyards returning to their homes
from the other side of the lake, and which, in that delusive landscape,
appeared to the eye to be within a stone's throw of the base of the
mountain, though, in truth, still a weary row from the land.

Nature has spread her work on a scale so magnificent in this sublime
region that ocular deceptions of this character abound, and it requires
time and practice to judge of those measurements which have been rendered
familiar in other scenes. In like manner to the bark under the rocks of
Savoy, there lay another, a heavy-moulded boat, nearly in a line with
Villeneuve, which seemed to float in the air instead of its proper
element, and whose oars were seen to rise and fall beneath a high mound,
that was rendered shapeless by refraction. This was a craft, bearing hay
from the meadows at the mouth of the Rhone to their proprietors in the
villages of the Swiss coast. A few light boats were pulling about in
front of the town of Vevey, and a forest of low masts and latine yards,
seen in the hundred picturesque attitudes peculiar to the rig, crowded the
wild anchorage that is termed its port.

An air-line drawn from St. Saphorin to Meillerie, would have passed
between the spars of the Winkelried, her distance from her haven,
consequently, a little exceeded a marine league. This space might readily
have been conquered in an hour or two by means of the sweeps, but for the
lumbered condition of the decks, which would have rendered their use
difficult, and the unusual draught of the bark, which would have caused
the exertion to be painful. As it has been seen, Baptiste preferred
waiting for the arrival of the night breeze to having recourse to an
expedient so toil some and slow.

We have already said, that the point just described was at the place where
the Leman fairly enters its eastern horn, and where its shores possess
their boldest and finest faces. On the side of Savoy, the coast was a
sublime wall of rocks, here and there clothed with chestnuts, or indented
with ravines and dark glens, and naked and wild along the whole line of
their giddy summits. The villages so frequently mentioned, and which have
become celebrated in these later times by the touch of genius, clung to
the uneven declivities, their lower dwellings la