my own eyes.

The great seamed rocks of the headlands are black, and white, and red, and
pink, and purple, and yellow; while up above, the short green herbage is
soft and smooth as velvet, and the waving bracken is like a dark green robe
of coarser stuff lined delicately with russet gold.

Now I have told you all this because I have met people whose only idea of
Sercq was of a storm-beaten rock, standing grim and stark among the
thousand other rocks that bite up through the sea thereabouts. Whereas, in
reality, our Island is a little paradise, gay with flowers all the year
round. For the gorse at all events is always aflame, even in the
winter--and then in truth most of all, both inside the houses and out; for,
inside, the dried bushes flame merrily in the wide hearthplaces, while,
outside, the prickly points still gleam like gold against the wintry gray.
And the land is fruitful too in trees and shrubs, though, in the more
exposed places, it is true, the trees suffer somewhat from the lichen,
which blows in from the sea, and clings to their windward sides, and slowly
eats their lives away.

And now to tell you of that which happened when I was three years old, and
I will make it all as clear as I can, from all that I have been able to
pick up, and from my knowledge of the places which are still very much as
they were then.

The front door of our Island is the tunnel in the rock cut by old Helier de
Carteret nearly three hundred years ago. Standing in the tunnel, you see on
one side the shingle of the beach where the boats lie but poorly sheltered
from the winter storms, though we are hoping before long to have a
breakwater capable of affording better shelter than the present one. You