And if this human nature was interesting, what about the natural world around us?  The boat loosed its moorings when time was up, and the grey walls of St. Malo receded; the innumerable roofs, towers and steeples grew dreamy and indistinct, dissolved and disappeared.  The water was still blue and calm and flashing with sunlight.  To the right lay the sleeping ocean; ahead of us, Dinard.  Land rose on all sides; bays and creeks ran upwards, out of sight; headlands, rich in verdure, magnificently wooded; houses standing out, here lonely and solitary, there clustering almost into towns and villages; the mouth of the Rance, leading up to Dol and Dinan, which some have called the Rhine of France, and everyone must think a stream lovely and romantic.

Most beautiful of all seemed Dinard, which we rapidly approached.  In twenty minutes we had passed into the little harbour beyond the pier.  It was quite a bustling quay, with carriages for hire, and men with barrows touting noisily for custom, treading upon each other’s heels in the race for existence; cafes and small hotels in the background.

Having plenty of time, we preferred to walk to the station, and consigned our baggage to the care of a deaf and dumb man, who disappeared with everything like magic, left us high and dry upon the quay to follow more leisurely, and to hope that we were not the victims of misplaced confidence.  It looked very much like it.

A steep climb brought us to the heights of Dinard.  Nothing could be more romantic.  Here were no traces of antiquity; everything was aggressively modern; all beauty lay in scenery and situation.  Humble cottages embowered in roses and wisteria; stately chateaux standing in large luxuriant gardens flaming with flowers, proudly secluded behind great iron gates.  At every opening the sea, far down, lay stretched before us.  Precipitous cliffs, rugged rocks where flowers and verdure grew in wild profusion, led sheer to the water’s edge.  Land everywhere rose in a dreamy atmosphere; St. Malo and St. Servan across the bay in the distance.  It was a wealth of vegetation; trees in full foliage, masses of gorgeous flowers, that you had only to stretch out your hand and gather; the blue sky over all.  A scene we sometimes realise in our dreams, rarely in our waking hours—­as we saw it that day.  On the far-off water below small white-winged boats looked as shadowy and dreamy as the far-off fleecy clouds above.

But we could not linger.  We passed away from the town and the sea and found ourselves in the country—­the station seemed to escape us like a will-o’-the-wisp.  Presently we came to where two roads met—­which of them led to the station?  No sign-post, no cottage.  We should probably have taken the wrong one—­who does not on these occasions?—­when happily a priest came in sight, with stately step and slow reading his breviary.  Of him we asked the way, and he very politely set us right, in French that was refreshing after the patois around us—­he was evidently a cultivated man; and offered to escort us.