The river where we entered it was about a hundred yards wide, and very deep. The water was at medium stage. The Rhône is not a very long river--six hundred miles--but it carries a bigger mass of water to the sea than any other French stream. For the first few miles we had lonely shores--hardly ever a house. On the left bank we had high precipices and domed hills; right bank low and wooded. At one point in the face of a precipice we saw a great cross (carved out of the living rock, the Admiral said) forty feet above the carriage road, where a doctor has had his tomb scooped in the rock and lies in there safe from his surviving patients--if any. At 1.25 P.M. we passed the slumbrous village of Massigneux de Rive on the right and the ditto village of Huissier on the left (in Savoie). We had to take all names by sound from the Admiral; he said nobody could spell them. There was a ferry at the former village. A wire is stretched across the river high overhead; along this runs a wheel which has ropes leading down and made fast to the ferryboat in such a way that the boat’s head is held farther upstream than its stern. This angle enables the current to drive the boat across, and no other motive force is needed. This would be a good thing on minor rivers in America. 2.10 P.M.--It is delightfully cool, breezy, shady (under the canopy), and still. Much smoking and lazy reflecting. There is no sound but the rippling of the current and the moaning of far-off breaks, except that now and then the Admiral dips a screechy oar to change the course half a point. In the distance one catches the faint singing and laughter of playing children or the softened note of a church bell or town clock. But the reposeful stillness--that is the charm--and the smooth swift gliding--and the fresh, clear, lively, gray-green water. There was such a rush, and boom, and life, and confusion, and activity in Geneva yesterday--how remote all that seems now, how wholly vanished away and gone out of this world! 2.15.--Village of Yenne. Iron suspension bridge. On the heights back of the town a chapel with a tower like a thimble, and a very tall white Virgin standing on it. 2.25.--Precipices on both sides now. River narrow--sixty yards. 2.30.--Immense precipice on right bank, with groups of buildings (Pierre Châtel) planted on the very edge of it. In its near neighborhood a massive and picturesque fortification. All this narrow gut from the bridge down to the next bridge--a mile or two--is picturesque with its frowning high walls of rock. In the face of the precipice above the second bridge sits a painted house on a rock bench--a chapel, we think, but the Admiral says it is for the storage of wine. More fortifications at the corner where the river turns--no cannon, but narrow slits for musketry commanding the river. Also narrow slits in the solid (hollowed-out) precipice. Perhaps there is no need of cannon here where you can throw a biscuit across from precipice to precipice.