Ah! sir, I should not hold out three months. I am not strong enough; and if I died, my father would be left a beggar. I must keep to a business that requires only a little skill and much patience."

"And how can two persons live on twelve cents a day?"

"Oh, sir, we eat cakes of buckwheat, and barnacles that I break off from the rocks."

Have you ever been abroad?”

"Once I went to Guérande, to draw my lot for the army; and went to Savenay, to show myself before those gentlemen who measured me. If I had been an inch taller, I should have been a soldier. I should have broken down at the first fatigue and my poor father would now be begging his bread."

We walked on a little way in silence, both of us sounding the mute depth of this unknown life, admiring the nobility of that devotion which ignored itself. The strength of this feebleness astonished us; this generous poverty dwarfed our fairer fortunes beside it. I beheld this purely instinctive creature chained to his rock like a galley-slave, watching these twenty years for the shellfish that nourished him, and sustained in the patience of his soul by one sentiment. How many hours wasted on the beach, how many hopes baffled by a flaw of wind, by a change of weather! Hanging to the corner of a granite ledge, his arm stretched out like a Hindoo fakir's, while his father, seated on a stool, awaited in silence and darkness the coarsest of shell-fish and bread, if so pleased the sea.

"Do you ever drink wine?" I asked him.

"Three or four times a year."

"Well, you shall drink some to-day — you and your father; and we will send you a loaf of white bread."

"You are very kind, sir."

"You shall dine with us, if you will guide us along the beach to Batz, where we go to see the tower that overlooks the basin on the coast between Batz and the Croisic."

With pleasure, sir. Continue straight along; I will rejoin you after I have put away my fish and tackle."

We gave a sign of assent, and he sprang forward, lighter of heart, towards the town.

-This meeting sustained the passional altitude that we had reached, yet sobered its gaiety.

"Poor man," said Pauline, with that accent which extracts from a woman's compassion the venom of pity; "are we not ashamed to be happy in sight of such misery?"

"No cruelty like that of impotent desire," I replied. "These two unfortunate beings will no more know the keenness of our sympathy than the world knows the beauty of their life, for they lay up treasures in heaven.”

"Poor country!" said she, pointing to the piles of dung laid symmetrically along a wall built of stones without mortar. "I was asking what they did that for; a peasant woman answered me that she was making wood. Can you imagine, my friend, that this is all these poor folks have to cook and warm themselves by? In the winter-time they are sold like motts of turf. And then what do you think the best seamstress is paid here for her day's work? Five cents," said she, after a pause; "but she has her

meals."

"These sea-winds, you observe," I answered, "dry up or overturn everything; there are no trees; the wrecks of condemned vessels are sold to the rich; for the price of transportation doubtless prevents them from burning here the wood with which Brittany still abounds. This country is only good for great souls; the heartless crowd can not subsist here it can only be inhabited by poets or by barnacles. They had to establish the salt mart here, in order to fix a population at all. Before us, the sea-here, the sands above, space."

We had already passed the town, and were in that sort of desert which separates the Croisic from the Bourg of Batz. Imagine a level of six miles filled with the glittering sands of the sea-shore. Here and there a few rocks raised their tops, looking like some gigantic animals reposing on the beach. Others below, around which played the billows, broke great white roses from their crests and crowned themselves with foam. Beholding this sea-girt savannah, the ocean to its right, and forming again to the left a lake between the Croisic and the sandy heights of Guérande, below which lie barren salt-marshes, I turned to Pauline, asking her if her courage could rise to the glow of this noon and her patience not sink in these sands.

"I have good gaiter boots on. Come, then," said she, point

ing to the tower of Batz, which stood warder of the landscape like a pyramid a pyramid withal so carved and tastefully ornate, that fancy was seduced to picture there the earliest ruin of some great city of the East. We soon gained a seat beside a rock, in the shade that ebbed towards noon-tide at our feet.

"How fine this silence is," said she; "how it deepens beneath the regular pulse of the sea on this beach!"

"If you surrender your mind to the three immensities which encircle us the water, the air, and the sands,-listening exclusively to the repeated sounds of the flux and the reflux," I replied, "you will not be able to bear its language: you will seem to discern there a thought that overpowers you. It is Nature ignoring the personality of Man. It seized me yesterday at sunset — this sensation,and it broke my spirit within me."

"Oh! yes, let us talk," said she, after a long pause. "No orator is more terrible. I seem to discover the causes of the harmonies that ensphere us," she resumed. "This landscape, which has but three decided colors the shining yellow sands, the blue sky, and the smooth green of the sea, is grand, without being wild-immense, yet not a desert- a monotone, yet not fatiguing. It has but three elements; it is varied.”

"A woman only thus interprets Nature. You would be the despair of a poet, in dissipating that veil of mystery behind which he shapes his creations; yet you are worth them all, and in divining you, have I not robbed the Sphynx of all her terrors?"

"The glow of noon now casts on these three expressions of the infinite a fierceness of color," said she, laughing, "that renders the poetry and the passions of the East."

"With despair for their background," said I.

"Yes, this beach is a sublime cloister."

We heard the hurried steps of our guide. He had put on his Sunday's best. We addressed a few insignificant words to him. He perceived our change of mood, and with the natural delicacy of solitude and misfortune, forbore to break upon it. We proceeded then in silence, holding each other by the hand like two children; for under that heat and in those deep sands we could not have made a dozen paces arm in arm. There was no road to Batz; the wind effaced all tracks from day to day. Only the practiced eye of our guide could follow its windings, now seaward, now landward, or turning around rocks. At noon we were only half way.

"We will rest down yonder," said I, pointing to a promontory composed of rocks high enough to give the idea that we should find a grotto there.

The fisherman, whose eye had followed mine, gave a shrug, replying, "Somebody lives there. Passengers going and coming between Batz and the Croisic all make a circuit, to avoid that spot.” These words, in an undertone, implied some mystery.

"Is it then a robber, an assassin ?"

Our guide answered only by a deep drawn breath, which increased our curiosity.

"But if we pass there, will any harm come to us?"

"Oh! no."

"Will you come with us?"

"No, sir."

"We will go, then, if you assure us that we run no risk.”

"I do not say that," replied he, quickly. "I only say that the person you will find there will say nothing to you, and will do you no harm he will not so much as stir from the place where he stands."

"Who is it, then?"

"A man!"

But never were two syllables uttered with so tragic an expression.

At this moment we were at twenty paces from that reef within which the waves were tossing. Our guide took the circuit of the rocks, we walked straight on, but Pauline took my arm. Our guide quickened his pace so as to meet us where the two roads joined.

Doubtless he thought that we should do the same when we had seen the man. This kindled our curiosity afresh, until it almost bordered on fear, as we knew by the beating of our hearts. Notwithstanding the heat of the day, and the fatigue of wading through the sands, the ineffable languor of a harmonious ecstasy still possessed our souls, the very music of pleasure, pure and copious, such as Mozart's andiamo mio ben diffuses with its notes. For two pure sentiments that blend, are they not indeed like two fine voices that sing in unison?

To appreciate truly the emotion we then felt, you must share the half voluptuous state into which the events of our morning had plunged us. Admire for a long time a pretty turtle-dove, swaying

at us.

on a limber branch near a spring, in the woods: you will utter a cry of pain on seeing a sparrow-hawk pounce upon it, bury its talons in its breast, and whirl it away with the murderous rapidity of a bullet. When we had stepped into the space before the grotto, a kind of balcony a hundred feet above the sea, and defended against its rage by a cascade of steep rocks, we started, as in hearing some strange and sudden noise break upon the silence of midnight. On a block of granite sat a man who had looked His glance, like the flame of a cannon, issued from bloodshot eyes, and his stoic immobility could only be compared with that of the granite piles around him. His eyes moved slowly, his body remained fixed as though he had been petrified; then, after having cast that look which had so startled us, he lifted his eyes again over the expanse of ocean and gazed on it, notwithstanding the dazzling gleam of its reflections, as eagles gaze upon the Sun, without winking. Call to your mind one of those old scathed oaks whose knotty trunk, recently stripped of its branches, raises its weird pillar on a deserted road. It was one of those Herculean forms, ruined, a face of the Olympian Jupiter, but marred by age, by the rude labors of the sea, by sorrow, by coarse food, and withal as if charred by lightning. The sinews of those hard and hairy hands stood out like veins of iron.

In a corner of the grotto lay a pile of moss, and on the ledge of the rock, a stone pitcher, covered with a broken loaf. Never had my imagination, in visiting the deserts where the first anchorites of Christianity fixed their abode, drawn me a figure more grandly religious, nor more horribly penitent, than was that of this man. Yet this remorse itself was drowned in the waves of prayer, the ceaseless prayer of mute despair. This fisherman, this mariner, this rough Breton, was sublime by an unknown sentiment. Had those eyes wept? Had that half-sculptured hand once struck? That rude brow, stamped with a ferocious probity, and on which strength had yet not failed to leave the traces of that mildness which is the attribute of all true force; that brow ploughed with wrinkles was it in harmony with a great heart? Why this man in granite? Why the granite in this man? Which was the man, or which the granite? A flood of thoughts descended. As our guide had anticipated, we passed in silence, quickly; he saw us moved with terror or fixed with astonishment, but simply said, "You have seen him?"