Croisic. His feet were bare; his linen trousers ragged round the
bottom; his shirt of common sailcloth, and his jacket tatters. This
abject poverty pained us; it was like a discord amid our harmonies. We
looked at each other, grieving mutually that we had not at that moment
the power to dip into the treasury of Aboul Casem. But we saw a
splendid lobster and a crab fastened to a string which the fisherman
was dangling in his right hand, while with the left he held his tackle
and his net.

We accosted him with the intention of buying his haul,--an idea which
came to us both, and was expressed in a smile, to which I responded by
a slight pressure of the arm I held and drew toward my heart. It was
one of those nothings of which memory makes poems when we sit by the
fire and recall the hour when that nothing moved us, and the place
where it did so,--a mirage the effects of which have never been noted
down, though it appears on the objects that surround us in moments
when life sits lightly and our hearts are full. The loveliest scenery
is that we make ourselves. What man with any poesy in him does not
remember some mere mass of rock, which holds, it may be, a greater
place in his memory than the celebrated landscapes of other lands,
sought at great cost. Beside that rock, tumultuous thoughts! There a
whole life evolved; there all fears dispersed; there the rays of hope
descended to the soul! At this moment, the sun, sympathizing with
these thoughts of love and of the future, had cast an ardent glow upon
the savage flanks of the rock; a few wild mountain flowers were
visible; the stillness and the silence magnified that rugged pile,
--really sombre, though tinted by the dreamer, and beautiful beneath
its scanty vegetation, the warm chamomile, the Venus' tresses with
their velvet leaves. Oh, lingering festival; oh, glorious decorations;
oh, happy exaltation of human forces! Once already the lake of Brienne