And, though I strove to maintain a cheerful demeanour, which was not always easy when the wind blew from the east, my deafness relieved me of any necessity of joining in that mask of merriment, which, as I have said, as often as not covered very sick hearts.  For though a merry face is better than a sad one, I take it to be the part of an honest man to bear himself simply as he is, and the honest sad faces drew me more than the merry masked ones through which the bones of our skeletons peeped grisly enough at times.

Thoughts of escape occupied some of us, but for most it was out of the question.  For, even if they could have got out of the enclosure and passed the sentries, their foreign speech and faces must have betrayed them at once outside.

To myself, however, that did not so fully apply.  In appearance I might easily pass as an English sailor, and the English speech came almost as readily to my tongue as my own.  It was with vague hopes in that direction, and also as a means of passing the long dull days, that I began carving bits of bone into odd shapes, and, when suitable pieces offered, into snuffboxes, which I sold to the country-folk who came in with provisions.  At first my rough attempts produced but pence, and then, as greater skill came with practice, shillings, and so I began to accumulate a small store of money against the time I should need it outside.

In building the prison in so marshy a district, advantage had been taken of a piece of rising ground.  The enclosure was built round it, so that the middle stood somewhat higher than the sides, and standing on that highest part one could see over the sharp teeth of the stockade and all round the countryside.

That wide view was not without a charm of its own, though its long dull levels grew wearisome to eyes accustomed only to the bold headlands and sharp scarps of Sercq, or to the ever-changing sea.  For miles all round were marshes where nothing seemed to grow but tussocks of long wiry grass, with great pools and channels of dark water in between.  Far away beyond them there were clumps of trees in places, and farther away still one saw here and there the spire of a church a great way off.

When we came there the wiry grass was yellow and drooping, like bent and rusted bayonets, and the pools were black and sullen, and the sky was gray and lowering and very dismal.  And in Sercq the rocks were golden in the sunshine, the headlands were great soft cushions of velvet turf, the heather purpled all the hillsides, and the tall bracken billowed under the west wind.  And on the gray rocks below, the long waves flung themselves in a wild abandon of delight, and shouted aloud because they were free.

Then the east winds came, and all the face of things blanched like the face of death, with coarse hairs sticking up out of it here and there.  The pools and ditches were white with ice, and all the countryside lay stiff and stark, a prisoner bound in chains and iron.  To stand there looking at it for even five minutes made one’s backbone rattle for half a day.  And yet, even then, in Sercq the sun shone soft and warm, the sky and sea were blue, the fouaille was golden-brown on the hillside, the young gorse was showing pale on the Eperquerie, and the Butcher’s Broom on Tintageu was brilliant with scarlet berries.