Boyd Winchester, author of a charming book on Switzerland, was born in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, September 23, 1836. He came to Kentucky when a youth and entered Centre College, Danville, where he studied for three years. He subsequently spent two years at the University of Virginia. Mr. Winchester was graduated from the Law School of Louisville, Kentucky, in 1858, and that city has been his home ever since. He rose rapidly in his profession; and he later served a single term in the Kentucky legislature, and two terms in the lower House of Congress. President Cleveland appointed Mr. Winchester United States Minister to Switzerland, in 1885, and the next four years he resided at Berne. While in Switzerland Mr. Winchester was an ardent student of the country's history and a keen observer of its aspects and institutions. On his return to the United States he wrote his well-known book, The Swiss Republic (Philadelphia, 1891). A fire his publishers, the Lippincotts, suffered shortly after his volume was issued, destroyed the unsold copies, and the small first edition was soon exhausted. The work has thus become exceedingly scarce.

Bibliography. National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York, 1906, v. xiii); General Catalogue of Centre College.

LAKE GENEVA[23]

[From The Swiss Republic (Philadelphia, 1891)]

The Lake of Geneva is the largest of Western Europe, being fifty-seven miles long, and its greatest width nine miles; it has its storms, its waves, and its surge; now placid as a mirror, now furious as the Atlantic; at times a deep-blue sea curling before the gentle waves, then a turbid ocean dark with the mud and sand from its lowest depths; the peasants on its banks still laugh at the idea of there being sufficient cordage in the world to reach the bottom of the Genfer-See. It is eleven hundred and fifty-four feet above the sea, and having the same depth, its bottom coincides with the sea-level; the water is of such exceeding purity that when analyzed only 0.157 in 1000 contain foreign elements. The lake lies nearly in the form of a crescent stretching from the southwest towards the northeast. Mountains rise on every side, groups of the Alps of Savoy, Valais, and Jura. The northern or the Swiss shore is chiefly what is known as a cote, or a declivity that admits of cultivation, with spots of verdant pasture scattered at its feet and sometimes on its breast, with a cheery range of garden, chalet, wood, and spire; villas, hamlets, and villages seem to touch each other down by the banks, and to form but one town, whilst higher up, they peep out from among the vineyards or nestle under the shade of walnut-trees. At the foot of the lake is the white city of Geneva, of which Bancroft wrote, "Had their cause been lost, Alexander Hamilton would have retired with his bride to Geneva, where nature and society were in their greatest perfection." The city is divided into two parts by the Rhone as it glides out of the basin of the lake on its course towards the Mediterranean. The Arve pours its turbid stream into the Rhone soon after that river issues from the lake. The contrast between the two rivers is very striking, the one being as pure and limpid as the other is foul and muddy. The Rhone seems to scorn the alliance and keeps as long as possible unmingled with his dirty spouse; two miles below the place of their junction a difference and opposition between this ill-assorted couple is still observable; these, however, gradually abate by long habit, till at last, yielding to necessity, and to the unrelenting law which joined them together, they mix imperfect union and flow in a common stream to the end of their course. At the head of the lake begins the valley of the Rhone, where George Eliot said, "that the very sunshine seemed dreary mid the desolation of ruin and of waste in this long, marshy, squalid valley; and yet, on either side of the weary valley are noble ranges of granite mountains, and hill resorts of charm and health...." Standing at almost any point on the Lake of Geneva, to the one side towers Dent-du-Midi, calm, proud, and dazzling, like a queen of brightness; on the other side is seen the Jura through her misty shroud extending in mellow lines, and a cloudless sky vying in depths of color with the azure waters. So graceful the outlines, so varied the details, so imposing the framework in which this lake is set, well might Voltaire exclaim, "Mon lac est le premier," (my lake is the first). For richness combined with grandeur, for softness around and impressiveness above, for a correspondence of contours on which the eye reposes with unwearied admiration, from the smiling aspect of fertility and cultivation at its lower extremity to the sublimity of a savage nature at its upper, no lake is superior to that of Geneva. Numberless almost are the distinguished men and women who have lived, labored, and died upon the shores of this fair lake; every spot has a tale to tell of genius, or records some history. In the calm retirement of Lausanne, Gibbon contemplated the decay of empires; Rousseau and Byron found inspiration on these shores; there is

Here is Chillon, with its great white wall sinking into the deep calm of the water, while its very stones echo memorable events, from the era of barbarism in 830, when Count Wala, who had held command of Charlemagne's forces, was incarcerated within the tower of this desolate rock during the reign of Louis le Debonnaire, to the imprisonment of the Salvation Army captain.

where Bonnivard, the prior of St. Victor and the great asserter of the independence of Geneva, was found when the castle was wrested from the Duke of Savoy by the Bernese.