ne, both being slight clinker-built Montreux
pleasure-boats, which I had spent some days in overhauling and
varnishing, mine with jib, fore-and-aft mainsail, and spanker, hers
rather smaller, one-masted, with an easy-running lug-sail. It was no
uncommon thing for me to sail quite to Geneva, and come back from a
seven-days' cruise with my soul filled and consoled with the lake and
all its many moods of bright and darksome, serene and pensive, dolorous
and despairing and tragic, at morning, at noon, at sunset, at midnight,
a panorama that never for an instant ceased to unroll its
transformations, I sometimes climbing the mountains as high as the
goat-herd region of hoch-alpen, once sleeping there. And once I was made
very ill by a two-weeks' horror which I had: for she disappeared in her
skiff, I being at the Chateau, and she did not come back; and while she
was away there was a tempest that turned the lake into an angry ocean,
and, ah my good God, she did not come. At last, half-crazy at the vacant
days of misery which went by and by, and she did not come, I set out
upon a wild-goose quest, of her--of all the hopeless things the most
hopeless, for the world is great--and I sought and did not find her; and
after three days I turned back, recognising that I was mad to search the
infinite, and coming near the Chateau, I saw her wave her handkerchief
from the island-edge, for she divined that I had gone to seek her, and
she was watching for me: and when I took her hand, what did she say to
me, the Biblical simpleton?--'Oh you of little Faith!' says she. And she
had adventures to lisp, with all the _r_'s liquefied into _l_'s, and I
was with her all that day again.

Once a month perhaps she would knock at my outermost door, which I
mostly kept locked when at home, bringing me a sumptuously-dressed,
highly-spiced red trout or grayling, which I had not the heart to
refuse, and exquisitely she does them, all hot and spiced, applying
apparently to their preparation the taste which she applies to dress;
and her extraordinary luck in angling did not fail to supply her with
the finest specimens, though, for that matter, this lake, with its old
fish-hatcheries and fish-ladders, is not miserly in that way, swarming
now with the best lake trout, river trout, red trout, and with salmon,
of which last I have brought in one with the landing-net of, I should
say, thirty-five to forty pounds. As the bottom goes off very rapidly
from the two