d, locating ourselves by the setting sun, we
resolved to head straight for Daoulas. Instantly our vigour returned,
and we started across the fields, vaulting fences and ditches, and
uprooting, tearing and breaking everything in our way, without giving a
thought to the stiles we left open or the damaged crops.

At the top of a slope, we discovered the village of l'Hopital lying in a
meadow watered by a stream. A bridge spans the latter and on this bridge
is a mill; beyond the meadow is a hill, which we started to climb
nimbly, when suddenly we saw, by a ray of light, a beautiful yellow and
black salamander creeping along the edge of a ditch with its slender
tail dragging in the dust and undulating with every motion of its
speckled body. It had come from its retreat under a big stone covered
with moss, and was hunting insects in the rotten trunks of old
oak-trees.

A pavement of uneven cobblestones echoed beneath our feet, and a street
stretched out before us. We had arrived in Daoulas. There was light
enough to enable us to distinguish a square sign swinging on an iron rod
on one of the houses. We should have recognised the inn even without the
sign, as houses, like men, have their professions stamped on their
faces. So we entered, for we were ravenous, and told the host above all
things not to keep us waiting.

While we were sitting in front of the door, waiting for our dinner, a
little girl in rags came along with a basket of strawberries on her
head. She entered the inn and came out again after a short while,
holding a big loaf of bread in both hands. Uttering shrill cries, she
scampered off with the alertness of a kitten. Her dusty hair fluttered
in the wind and stood out straight from her wizened face, and her bare
legs, which she lifted high in the air when running, disappeared under
the rags that covered her form.

After our meal, which comprised, besides the unavoidable omelet and the
fatal veal, the strawberries the little girl had brought, we went up to
our rooms.

The winding staircase with its worm-eaten steps groaned beneath our
weight, like a sensitive woman under a new disillusion. At the top was a
room with a door that closed on the outside with a hook. We slept there.
The plaster on the once yellow walls was crumbling away; the beams of
the ceiling bent beneath the weight of the slated roof, and on the
window-panes was a layer of dust that softened the light like a piece of
unpolished glass. The be