Consequently, you
soon begin to stagnate with the rest.

You grow more and more stupid as the weeks pass, and at the end of a
month you cease to think. From that time on you do not have such a bad
time--that is to say, you do not suffer so acutely, because you have
now got down to the level of the people who go back to Dinard the next
year.

We came away. The hotels are among the worst on earth--musty,
old-fashioned, and villainously expensive--and one of the happiest
moments in my life was the day when I left Dinard for Mont St. Michel.
Mont St. Michel is one of the most out-of-the-way, un-get-at-able
places I found in all Europe; but, oh, how it rewards one who arrives!

Mont St. Michel is too well known to need a description. But to go
from Dinard requires, first of all, that one must go by boat over to
St. Malo, thence by train; change cars, and alight finally at a lonely
little station, behind which stands a sort of vehicle--a cross between
a London omnibus and a hay-wagon. You scramble to the top of this as
best you may. Nobody helps you. The Frenchman behind you crowds
forward and climbs up ahead of you and holds you back with his
umbrella while he hauls his fat wife up beside him. Then you clamber
up by the hub of the wheel and by sundry awkward means which remind
you of climbing a stone wall when you were a child. You take any seat
left, which the Frenchmen do not want, the horses are put to, and away
you go over a smooth sandy road for eleven miles, with the sea
crawling up on each side of you over the dunes.

Suddenly, without warning, you come squarely upon Mont St. Michel,
rising solidly five hundred feet from nowhere. There is a whole town
in this fortress, built upon this rock, street above street, like a
flight of stairs, and house piled up behind house, until on the very
top there is one of the most famous cathedrals in the world; and as
you thread its maze of vaulted chambers and dungeons and come to its
gigantic tower you are lost in absolute wonder at the building of it.

Where did they get the material? And when got, what human ingenuity
could raise those enormous blocks of stone to that vast height? How
those cannon swept all approach by land or sea as far as the eye could
reach! It would require superb courage in an enemy to come within
reach of that grim sentinel of France, manned by her warrior monks.
What secrets those awful dungeons might relate! Here political crimes
were avenged with a