d rock. Here the guide brought them to a
dark and gloomy place in a corner, where, by standing a little back,
they could see all the pillars in a row; and he said that if they would
count them they would find that there were exactly seven. The boys did
so, and they found that there were seven; but they did not understand
why the number was of any importance. But the teacher explained it to
them. He said that Byron had mentioned seven as the number of the
pillars in his poem, and that most people who had read the poem were
pleased to observe the correspondence between his description and the
reality.

The teacher quoted the lines. They were these:--

"In Chillon's dungeons, deep and old,
There are seven columns, massy and gray,
Dim with a dull, imprisoned ray--
A sunbeam that hath lost its way,
And through the crevice and the cleft
Of the thick wall is fallen and left
Creeping o'er the floor so damp,
Like a marsh's meteor lamp."

In repeating these lines, the teacher spoke in a strong foreign accent.
All the boys listened attentively while he spoke, though of course only
Rollo and those of the boys who had studied English could understand
him.

After this the boys came back through the whole range of dungeons, by
the same way that they had come in. They could now see the beam from
which the condemned criminals were hung. It passed across from rock to
rock, high above their heads, in a dark and gloomy place, and seemed
perfectly black with age.

When the party came out of the dungeons, a young woman took them in
charge, to show them the apartments above. She conducted them up a broad
flight of stone stairs to a massive doorway, which led to the principal
story of the castle. Here the boys passed through one after another of
several large halls, which were formerly used for various purposes when
the castle was inhabited, but are employed now for the storage of brass
cannons, and of ammunition belonging to the Swiss government. When the
castle was built, the country in which it stands belonged to a
neighboring state, called Savoy; and it was the Duke of Savoy, who was a
sort of king, that built it, and it was he that confined the prisoners
in it so cruelly. Many of them were confined there on account of being
accused of conspiring against his government. At length, however, the
war broke out between Switzerland and Savoy, and the Swiss were
victorious. They besieged this cast