other
productions of the island, not excepting its grapes and its lobsters.

"I don't suppose you ever saw cabbages growing six feet high before,"
said the Captain.

"No," answered Vixen; "they are too preposterous to be met with in a
civilised country. Poor Charles the Second! I don't wonder that he was
wild and riotous when he came to be king."

"Why not?"

"Because he had spent several months of exile among his loyal subjects
in Jersey. A man who had been buried alive in such a fragmentary bit of
the world must have required some compensation in after life."

They had mounted a long hill which seemed the pinnacle of the island,
and from whose fertile summit the view was full of beauty--a green
undulating garden-world, ringed with yellow sands and bright blue sea;
and now they began to descend gently by a winding lane where again the
topmost elm-branches were interwoven, and where the glowing June day
was softened to a tender twilight. A curve in the lane brought them
suddenly to an old gateway, with a crumbling stone bench in a nook
beside it--a bench where the wayfarer used to sit and wait for alms,
when the site of Les Tourelles was occupied by a monastery.

The old manor house rose up behind the dilapidated wall--a goodly old
house as to size and form--overlooking a noble sweep of hillside and
valley; a house with a gallery on the roof for purposes of observation,
but with as dreary and abandoned a look about its blank curtainless
windows as if mansion and estate had been in Chancery for the last
half-century.

"A fine old place, is it not?" asked the Captain, while a cracked bell
was jingling in remote distance, amidst the drowsy summer stillness,
without eliciting so much as the bark of a house-dog.

"It looks very big," Violet answered dubiously, "and very empty."

"My aunt has no relatives residing with her."

"If she had started in life with a large family of brothers and
sisters, I should think they would all be dead by this time," said the
girl, with a stifled yawn that was half a sigh.

"How do you mean?"

"They would have died of the stillness and solitude and all-pervading
desolation of Les Tourelles."

"Strange houses are apt to look desolate."

"Yes. Particularly when the windows have neither blinds nor curtains,
and the walls have not been painted for a century."

After this conversation flagged. The jingling bell was once more set
going in the unknown distance; Vixen sat looking sl