"Allez! Allez!" and the angry derision of the passengers. We were in
fact all furious, and it was as much as a mule team with bells, drawing
a wagon loaded with bags of flower, and a tree growing out of a tower
beside the lake, could do to put me in good-humor. Yet I was not really
in a hurry to have the voyage end; I was enjoying every moment of it,
only, when your boat starts, you do not want to stop for a woman to kiss
her husband.

Again we were passing the wild Savoyard shore, where the yellow tops of
the poplars jutted up like spires from the road-sides, and on the
hill-sides tracts of dark evergreens blotted their space out of the
vaster expanses of autumn foliage; back of all rose gray cliffs and
crags. Now and then we met a boat of our line; otherwise the blue
stretch of the water was broken only by the lateen-sails of the
black-hulked lake craft. At that season the delicate flame of the
Virginia-creeper was a prominent tint on the walls all round the lake.

Lausanne, which made us think Gibbon, of course, was a stately stretch
of architecture along her terraces; Vevay showed us her quaint market
square, and her old church on its heights; then came Montreux with its
many-hotelled slopes and levels, and chalets peeping from the brows of
the mountains that crowd it upon the lake. All these places keep
multitudes of swans, whose snow reddened in the sunset that stained the
water more and more darkly crimson till we landed at Villeneuve.


VIII

When December came, and the vintage and elections were over, and the
winter had come down into the valley to stay, Italy called to us more