eeze of the night. The last current came out of the
gorge of the Valais, sullen, strong, and hoarse, bringing him, however,
fairly to windward of his port. The Winkelried was cast in season, and,
when the gale struck her anew, her canvass drew fairly, and she walked out
from beneath the mountains into the broad lake, like a swan obeying its
instinct.

The passage across the width of the Leman, in that horn of the crescent
and in such a breeze, required rather more than an hour. This time was
occupied among the common herd in self-felicitations, and in those vain
boastings that distinguish the vulgar who have escaped an imminent danger
without any particular merit of their own. Among those whose spirits were
better trained and more rebuked, there were attentions to the sufferers
and deep thanksgivings with the touching intercourse of the grateful and
happy. The late scenes, and the fearful fate of the patron and Nicholaus
Wagner, cast a shade upon their joy, but all inwardly felt that they had
been snatched from the jaws of death.

Maso shaped his course by the beacon that still blazed in the grate of old
Roger de Blonay. With his eye riveted on the luff of his sail, his hip
bearing hard against the tiller, and a heart that relieved itself, from
time to time, with bitter sighs, he ruled the bark like a presiding
spirit.

At length the black mass of the cotes of Vaud took more distinct and
regular forms. Here and there, a tower or a tree betrayed its outlines
against the sky, and then the objects on the margin of the lake began to
stand out in gloomy relief from the land. Lights flared along the strand,
and cries reached them, from the shore. A dark shapeless pile stood
directly athwart their watery path, and, at the next moment, it took the
aspect of a ruined castle-like edifice. The canvass flapped and was
handed, the Winkelried rose and set more slowly and with a gentler
movement, and glided into the little, secure, artificial haven of La Tour
de Peil. A forest of latine yards and low masts lay before them, but, by
giving the bark a rank sheer, Maso brought her to her berth, by the side
of another lake craft, with a gentleness of collision that, as the
mariners have it, would not have broken an egg.

A hundred voices greeted the travellers; for their approach had been seen
and watched with intense anxiety. Fifty eager Vevaisans poured upon her
deck, in a noisy crowd, the instant it was possible. Among others, a dark