and so were the bedchambers of the duke and duchess, and the great Hall
of the Knights. The wells or pits, armed round with knife points,
against which the prisoner struck when hurled down through them into the
lake, have long had their wicked throats choked with sand; and the bed
hewn out of the rock, where the condemned slept the night before
execution, is no longer used for that purpose--possibly because the only
prisoners now in Chillon are soldiers punished for such social offences
as tipsiness. But the place was all charmingly mediæval, and the more so
for a certain rudeness of decoration. The artistic merit was purely
architectural, and this made itself felt perhaps most distinctly in the
prison vaults, which Longfellow pronounced "the most delightful dungeon"
he had ever seen. A great rose-tree overhung the entrance, and within we
found them dry, wholesome, and picturesque. The beautiful Gothic pillars
rose like a living growth from the rock, out of which the vault was half
hewn; but the iron rings to which the prisoners were chained still hung
from them. The columns were scribbled full of names, and Byron's was
among the rest. The _vionnet_ of Bonivard was there, beside one of the
pillars, plain enough, worn two inches deep and three feet long in the
hard stone. Words cannot add to the pathos of it.

[Illustration: _The Prisoner of Chillon_]


XI

Nothing could be more nobly picturesque than the outside of Chillon. Its
base is beaten by the waves of the lake, to which it presents wide
masses of irregularly curving wall, pierced by narrow windows, and
surmounted by Mansard-roofs. Wild growths of vines and shrubs break the
broad surfaces of the wall, and out of the shoulders of one of the