La pauvre bete n’est pas encore guerie.  Cela ne nous laisse que deux.  Nous les chasserons sans doute si monsieur le veut; mais que feronsnous l’annee prochaine?  Si monsieur veut bien achever cette pauvre bete blessee, ca peut s’arranger.’

     ‘Well, but have you no covert shooting—­no hares?’

’Les lievres? mais certainement, nous avons des lievres.  Nous irons dans la foret, je prendrai mes chiens, et je vous montrerai de belles lievres.  J’en ai trois—­Josephine, Alphonse, et le vieux Adolphe.  Pour le moment Josephine est sacree—­elle est mere.  Le petit Alphonse s’est marie avec elle, comme ca il est un peu pere de famille; nous l’epargnerons, n’est-ce-pas, monsieur?  Mais le vieux Adolphe, nous le tuerons; c’est deja temps; voila cinq ans que je le chasse!’

MONT ST. MICHAEL.

From the terrace of the Jardin des Plantes, where we are never tired of the view (although some residents complain that it becomes monotonous, because they are too far from the sea to enjoy its variety), the grey mount of St. Michael is ever before us, gleaming in the sunshine or looming through the storm.  In our little sketch we have given as accurately as possible its appearance from Avranches on a summer’s day after rain;[29] but it should be seen when a storm passes over it, when the same clouds that we have watched so often on summer nights, casting deep shadows on the intervening plain—­some silver-lined that may have expressed hope, some black as midnight that might mean despair—­come over to us like messengers from the great rock, and take our little promontory by storm.  They come silently one by one, and gather round and fold over us; then suddenly clap their hands and burst with such a deluge of rain that it seems a matter for wonder that any little creeping human things could survive the flood.  And it does us good; we are thoroughly drenched, our houses and gardens do not recover their fair presence for weeks; our little prejudices and foibles are well nigh washed out of us, and we are reminded of the dread reality of the lives of our neighbours on the island, who form a much larger colony than ourselves.[30]

‘On no account omit a visit to Mont St. Michael,’ say the guide-books, and accordingly we charter a carriage on a summer’s morning and are driven in a few hours along a bad road, to the edge of the sands about a mile from the mount—­the same sands that we saw depicted in the Bayeux tapestry, when William and Harold marched on Dinan.  We choose a favourable time of the tide, and approach the gates at the foot of the mount dryshod.[31]

For a thousand years pilgrims have crossed these treacherous sands to lay their offerings at the feet of the Archangel Michael; Norman dukes and monks of the middle ages have paid their devotion at his shrine, and troops of pilgrims in all ages, even to this day, when a party of English school-girls come tripping across the bay, provided with a passport and a fee, bent upon having the terrors of the prison-house shewn to them as easily as the ‘chamber of horrors’ at Madame Tussaud’s.