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 laved by the lake, and their
upper confounded with the rugged faces of the mountains. Beyond the limits
of the Leman, the Alps shot up into still higher pinnacles, occasionally
showing one of those naked excrescences of granite, which rise for a
thousand feet above the rest of the range--a trifle in the stupendous
scale of the vast piles--and which, in the language of the country are not
inaptly termed Dents, from some fancied and plausible resemblance to
human teeth. The verdant meadows of Noville, Aigle and Bex. spread for
leagues between these snow-capped barriers, so dwindled to the eye,
however, that the spectator believed that to be a mere bottom, which was,
in truth, a broad and fertile plain. Beyond these again, came the
celebrated pass of St. Maurice, where the foaming Rhone dashed between two
abutments of rock, as if anxious to effect its exit before the