ere might have heard him singing, in an undertone, the air of "Bonnie
Dundee."

PART III.--DERUCHETTE

BOOK I

NIGHT AND THE MOON

I

THE HARBOUR BELL

The St. Sampson of the present day is almost a city; the St. Sampson of
forty years since was almost a village.

When the winter evenings were ended and spring had come, the inhabitants
were not long out of bed after sundown. St. Sampson was an ancient
parish which had long been accustomed to the sound of the curfew-bell,
and which had a traditional habit of blowing out the candle at an early
hour. Those old Norman villages are famous for early roosting, and the
villagers are generally great rearers of poultry.

The people of St. Sampson, except a few rich families among the
townsfolk, are also a population of quarriers and carpenters. The port
is a port of ship repairing. The quarrying of stone and the fashioning
of timber go on all day long; here the labourer with the pickaxe, there
the workman with the mallet. At night they sink with fatigue, and sleep
like lead. Rude labours bring heavy slumbers.

One evening, in the commencement of the month of May, after watching the
crescent moon for some instants through the trees, and listening to the
step of Deruchette, walking alone in the cool air in the garden of the
Bravees, Mess Lethierry had returned to his room looking on the harbour,
and had retired to rest; Douce and Grace were already a-bed. Except
Deruchette, the whole household were sleeping. Doors and shutters were
everywhere closed. Footsteps were silent in the streets. Some few
lights, like winking eyes about to close in rest, showed here and there
in windows in the roofs, indicating the hour of domestics going to bed.
Nine had already struck in the old Romanesque belfry, surrounded by ivy,
which shares with the church of St. Brelade at Jersey the peculiarity of
having for its date four ones (IIII), which are used to signify eleven
hundred and eleven.

The popularity of Mess Lethierry at St. Sampson had been founded on his
success. The success at an end, there had come a void. It might be
imagined that ill-fortune is contagious, and that the unsuccessful have
a plague, so rapidly are they put in quarantine. The young men of
well-to-do families avoided Deruchette. The isolation around the Bravees
was so complete that its inmates had not even yet heard the news of the
great local event which had that day set all St. Sampson in a fer