subject for a sketch.

The little port, which has two basins and is accessible only to vessels
of light tonnage, had a certain gaiety and as much local colour as you
please. Fisher-folk of picturesque type were strolling about, most of
them Bretons; several of the men with handsome, simple faces, not at all
brutal, and with a splendid brownness--the golden-brown colour on cheek
and beard that you see on an old Venetian sail. It was a squally,
showery day, with sudden drizzles of sunshine; rows of rich-toned
fishing-smacks were drawn up along the quays. The harbour is effective
to the eye by reason of three battered old towers which at different
points overhang it and look infinitely weather-washed and sea-silvered.
The most striking of these, the Tour de la Lanterne, is a big grey mass

[Illustration]

of the fifteenth century, flanked with turrets and crowned with a Gothic
steeple. I found it was called by the people of the place the Tour des
Quatre Sergents, though I know not what connection it has with the
touching history of the four young sergeants of the garrison of La
Rochelle who were arrested in 1821 as conspirators against the
Government of the Bourbons, and executed, amid general indignation, in
Paris in the following year. The quaint little walk, with its label of
Rue sur les Murs, to which one ascends from beside the Grosse Horloge,
leads to this curious Tour de la Lanterne and passes under it. This walk
has the top of the old town-wall, towards the sea, for a parapet on one
side, and is bordered on the other with decent but irregular little
tenements of fishermen, where brown old women, whose caps are as white
as if they were painted, seem chiefly in possession. In this direction
there is a very pretty stretch of shore, out of the town, through the
fortifications (which are Vauban's, by the way); through, also, a
diminutive public garden or straggling shrubbery which edges the water
and carries its stunted verdure as far as a big Etablissement des Bains.
It was too late in the year to bathe, and the Etablissement had the
bankrupt aspect which belongs to such places out of the season; so I
turned my back upon it and gained, by a circuit in the course of which
there were sundry water-side items to observe, the other side of the
cheery little port, where there is a long breakwater and a still longer
sea-wall, on which I walked a while, to inhale the strong, salt breath
of the Bay of Biscay. La Rochelle serv