eld us, it would
be necessary to share the state of half sensuous delight into which the
events of the morning had plunged us. Admire for a long time some pretty
dove with iridescent colors, perched on a swaying branch above a spring,
and you will give a cry of pain when you see a hawk swooping down upon
her, driving its steel claws into her breast, and bearing her away with
murderous rapidity. When we had advanced a step or two into an open
space which lay before what seemed to be a grotto, a sort of esplanade
placed a hundred feet above the ocean, and protected from its fury
by buttresses of rock, we suddenly experienced an electrical shudder,
something resembling the shock of a sudden noise awaking us in the dead
of night.

We saw, sitting on a vast granite boulder, a man who looked at us. His
glance, like that of the flash of a cannon, came from two bloodshot
eyes, and his stoical immobility could be compared only to the immutable
granite masses that surrounded him. His eyes moved slowly, his body
remaining rigid as though he were petrified. Then, having cast upon us
that look which struck us like a blow, he turned his eyes once more to
the limitless ocean, and gazed upon it, in spite of its dazzling
light, as eagles gaze at the sun, without lowering his eyelids. Try to
remember, dear uncle, one of those old oaks, whose knotty trunks, from
which the branches have been lopped, rise with weird power in some
lonely place, and you will have an image of this man. Here was a ruined
Herculean frame, the face of an Olympian Jove, destroyed by age, by
hard sea toil, by grief, by common food, and blackened as it were by
lightning. Looking at his hard and hairy hands, I saw that the sinews
stood out like cords of iron. Everything about him denoted strength of
constitution. I noticed in a corner of the grotto a quantity of moss,
and on a sort of ledge carved by nature on the granite, a loaf of bread,
which covered the mouth of an earthenware jug. Never had my imagination,
when it carried me to the deserts where early Christian anchorites spent
their lives, depicted to my mind a form more grandly religious nor more
horribly repentant than that of this man. You, who have a life-long
experience of the confessional, dear uncle, you may never, perhaps,
have seen so awful a remorse,--remorse sunk in the waves of prayer, the
ceaseless supplication of a mute despair. This fisherman, this mariner,
this hard, coarse Breton, was sublime t