first Sundays after our arrival we descended the stone staircased steps
of our gardened terrace, dripping with ivy and myrtle, and picked our
steps over the muddy road to the old prison-fortress, where, in the
ancient chapel of the Dukes of Savoy, we heard an excellent sermon from
the _pasteur_ of our parish. The castle was perhaps a bow-shot from our
pension: I did not test the distance, having left my trusty cross-bow
and cloth-yard shafts in Boston; but that is my confirmed guess. In
point of time it is much more remote, for, as the reader need not be
reminded, it was there, or some castle like it, almost from the
beginning, or at least from the day when men first began to fight for
the possession of the land. The lake-dwellers are imagined to have had
some sort of stronghold there; and it is reasonably supposed that
Romans, Franks, and Burgundians had each fortified the rock. Count Wala,
cousin of Charlemagne, and grandson of Charles Martel, was a prisoner in
its dungeon in 830 for uttering some words too true for an age
unaccustomed to the perpetual veracity of our newspapers. Count Wala,
who was also an abbot, had the misfortune to speak of Judith of Bavaria
as "the adulterous woman," and when her husband, Louis le Debonair, came
back to the throne after the conspiracy of his sons, the lady naturally
wanted Wala killed; but Louis compromised by throwing him into the rock
of Chillon. This is what Wala's friends say: others say that he was one
of the conspirators against Louis. At any rate, he was the first great
captive of Chillon, which was a political prison as long as political
prisoners were needed in Switzerland. That is now a good while ago.

[Illustration: _The Castle of Chillon_]

Chillon fell to the princes of the house of Savoy in 1033, and Count
Peter, whom they nicknamed Little Charlemagne for his prowess and his
conquests, built the present castle, after which the barons of the Pays