Every Wednesday evening, at sunset, the hour therefore varying with the
month, I left home accompanied by Lucette's elder brother, a grown boy
of eighteen or twenty, who seemed to me a man of mature age. As far as
I was able I tried to keep pace with him, and, in consequence, I was
obliged to go more rapidly than when I walked with my father and sister;
we went through the quiet streets lying near the ramparts, and passed
the sailors' old barracks, the sounds of whose bugles and drums reached
as far as my attic museum when the south wind blew; then we passed
through the fortifications by the most ancient of its gray gates,--a
gate almost abandoned, and used now principally by peasants with flocks
of sheep and droves of cattle,--and finally we arrived at the road that
led to the river.

A mile and a half of straight road stretched before us, and this path
lay between stunted old trees yellow with lichens whose branches were
blown to the left by the force of the sea-winds that almost constantly
came from the west, sweeping over the broad and level meadows that lay
between us and the ocean.

To those who have a conventionalized idea of country beauty, and to whom
a charming landscape means a river winding its way between poplars, or a
mountain crowned by an old castle, this level road would look very ugly.

But I found it exquisite in spite of its straight lines. Upon the left
there was nothing to be seen but grassy meadow land over which herds of
cattle strayed. And before us, in the distance, something that resembled
a line of ramparts shut in the plains sadly: it was the edge of a rocky
plateau at whose base flowed the river. The far bank of this river was
higher than the side that we were on, and was, in some respects, of