320 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Scott and Burns, and so up to the extreme north, over the 

 lakes, beyond Inverness, down through the Caledonian Canal, 

 among the Highlands, and tlie Hebrides Islands, and so return- 

 ing by way of Chester, Shrewsbury and Worcester, to London, 

 and down the Thames, crossing again to Boulogne and Paris. 

 And I now propose, for the sake of greater harmony of arrange- 

 ment, to ask you to follow me back a little while to Switzer- 

 land, till I finish what remains to be said, and to call your 

 attention to England and Scotland on a subsequent page. 



It was in September when I left Paris for Switzerland, by 

 way of Strasbourg and Basle, to keep an engagement I had 

 made with that model of a national representative, Mr. Fogg. 

 Strasbourg is a large and flourishing city on the Rhine, the 

 eastern frontier of France. It is particularly noted for its 

 remarkable cathedral, the spire of which is four hundred and 

 seventy-four feet above the pavement, one hundred and twelve 

 feet higher than St. Paul's in London, and twenty-four feet 

 higher than the great Pyramid. It is justly regarded as a 

 master-piece of architecture. The farming in the neighbor- 

 hood is of the highest order, so far as I could judge from the 

 luxuriance of the crops. Tobacco and root crops covered the 

 ground. 



Passing again through Berne and Fribourg, we soon arrived 

 at Yevay, on the eastern shore of the lake of Geneva, on our 

 way to the great Saint Bernard. The vineyards in this part of 

 Switzerland are very extensive, and the grapes hung at this 

 time in great ripe clusters, the most tempting sight I had 

 hitherto seen, for when in Switzerland a month ago, they were 

 still green and comparatively unattractive. It was an agree- 

 able surprise here to meet Mr. Samuel Bowles, of Springfield, 

 and liis brother, and to have a ramble of some six miles with 

 them through the vineyards, along the romantic shores of the 

 lake, to the castle of Chillon." Tliere is the dungeon where 

 the patriot Bonnevard was confined, chained six years to a 

 stone pillar, so that he could move but three steps. The path 

 is worn into the solid floor. We saw the torture chamber, the 

 pulleys by which the limbs of the poor victims were broken, 

 the beam on which they burned the feet of ])risoners, all scorched 

 with the irijns, the oven where the irons were heated, and the 

 stonc'on which, after torture, they were laid to be strangled, on 



