Abondance, though much frequented by French families in summer, has absolutely nothing of the modern fashionable spirit that is rather too apparent at Thonon or Evian-les-Bains. Its inns, though comfortable enough for those who are not unduly fastidious, are still genuine mountain hostelries; and the type of French family life, though possibly wholly bourgeois, that may be studied here in August is amusing and piquant indeed, in contrast with the rather dull banalities of much more fashionable watering-places, such as Vichy or Aix-les-Bains. IV. We come at length to that north shore of the lake which already we have noted with critical preference. We shall penetrate no longer amidst royally wooded hills, nor linger on mossy banks by the side of impetuous mountain streams. Our immediate natural environment, on the contrary, will now be comparatively dull; but by way of compensation we shall have always across the water, provided the day be clear, the massed and tumultuous grouping of those stern and shapely mountains of Savoy, which hitherto we have inspected, in the three secluded valleys of the Dranse, by sample and parcel only (as one cannot see the wood for the number of the trees). Moreover, instead of fashionable Thonon, and perhaps still more fashionable Evian, we have now in rapid succession a series of villages and small towns, along the actual margin of the lake, that are mostly of very old-world aspect, and often of some historical regard. We shall begin, however, by deserting the actual littoral for a short digression inland over the frontier into France, to visit one of those two or three great literary shrines that are connected with Lac Leman, and are not without interest to the student of the French Revolution and of modern thought. [Illustration: EVIAN LES BAINS, HTE. SAVOIE.]