ute near this extremity of the Leman. After climbing to the heigh
of the mild and healthful Montreux, the cavalcade again descended, under a
canopy of nut-trees, to the gate of Chillon, and, sweeping around the
margin of the sheet, it reached Villeneuve by the hour that had been named
for an early morning repast. Here all dismounted, and refreshed themselves
awhile, when Roger de Blonay and his attendants, after many exchanges of
warm and sincere good wishes, took their final leave.

The sun was scarcely yet visible in the deep glens, when those who were
destined for St. Bernard were again in the saddle. The road now
necessarily left the lake, traversing those broad alluvial bottoms which
have been deposited during thirty centuries by the washings of the Rhone,
aided, if faith is to be given to geological symptoms and to ancient
traditions, by certain violent convulsions of nature. For several hours
our travellers rode amid such a deep fertility, and such a luxuriance of
vegetation, that their path bore more analogy to an excursion on the wide
plains of Lombardy, than to one amid the usual Swiss scenery; although,
unlike the boundless expanse of the Italian garden, the view was limited
on each side by perpendicular barriers of rock, that were piled for
thousands of feet into the heavens, and which were merely separated from
each other by a league or two, a distance that dwindled to miles in its
effect on the eye, a consequence of the grandeur of the scale on which
nature has reared these vast piles.

It was high-noon when Melchior de Willading and his venerable friend led
the way across the foaming Rhone, at the celebrated bridge of St Maurice.
Here the country of the Valais, then like Geneva, an ally, and not a
confederate of the Swiss cantons, was entered, and all objects, both
animate and inanimate, began to assume that mixture of the grand, the
sterile, the luxuriant, and the revolting, for which this region is so
generally known. Adelheid gave an involuntary shudder, her imagination
having been prepared by rumor for even more than the truth would have
given reason to expect, when the gate of St. Maurice swung back upon its
hinges, literally inclosing the party in this wild, desolate, and yet
romantic region. As they proceeded along the Rhone, however, she and
those of her companions to whom the scene was new, were constantly
wondering at some unlooked-for discrepancy, that drove them from
admiration to disgust--fro