e; it was, in fact, to substitute an
obstacle which will appease, for an obstacle which irritates.

Gilliatt, with all that dexterity which he possessed, and which is so
much more efficient than mere force, sprang upon the rocks like a
chamois among the mountains or a monkey in the forest; using for his
tottering and dizzy strides the smallest projecting stone; leaping into
the water, and issuing from it again; swimming among the shoals and
clambering the rocks, with a rope between his teeth and a mallet in his
hand. Thus he detached the cable which kept suspended and also fast to
the basement of the Little Douvre the end of the forward side of the
Durande; fashioned out of some ends of hawsers a sort of hinges, holding
this bulwark to the huge nails fixed in the granite; swung this
apparatus of planks upon them, like the gates of a great dock, and
turned their sides, as he would turn a rudder, outward to the waves,
which pushed the extremities upon the Great Douvre, while the rope
hinges detained the other extremities upon the Little Douvre; next he
contrived, by means of the huge nails placed beforehand for the purpose,
to fix the same kind of fastenings upon the Great Douvre as on the
little one; made completely fast the vast mass of woodwork against the
two pillars of the gorge, slung a chain across this barrier like a
baldric upon a cuirass; and in less than an hour, this barricade against
the sea was complete and the gullet of the rocks closed as by a
folding-door.

This powerful apparatus, a heavy mass of beams and planks, which laid
flat would have made a raft, and upright formed a wall, had by the aid
of the water been handled by Gilliatt with the adroitness of a juggler.
It might almost have been said that the obstruction was complete before
the rising sea had the time to perceive it.

It was one of those occasions on which Jean Bart would have employed the
famous expression which he applied to the sea every time he narrowly
escaped shipwreck. "We have cheated the Englishman;" for it is well
known that when that famous admiral meant to speak contemptuously of the
ocean he called it "the Englishman."

The entrance to the defile being thus protected, Gilliatt thought of the
sloop. He loosened sufficient cable for the two anchors to allow her to
rise with the tide; an operation similar to what the mariners of old
called "_mouiller avec des embossures_." In all this, Gilliatt was not
taken the least by surpris