A SPRING DRIVE.


The Trouville beach was as empty as a desert. No other footfall, save
our own, echoed along the broad board walks; this Boulevard des
Italiens of the Normandy coast, under the sun of May was a shining
pavement that boasted only a company of jelly-fishes as loungers.

Down below was a village, a white cluster of little wooden houses; this
was the village of the bath houses. The hotels might have been
monasteries deserted and abandoned, in obedience to a nod from Rome or
from the home government. Not even a fisherman's net was spread
a-drying, to stay the appetite with a sense of past favors done by the
sea to mortals more fortunate than we. The whole face of nature was as
indifferent as a rich relation grown callous to the voice of entreaty.
There was no more hope of man apparently, than of nature, being moved
by our necessity; for man, to be moved, must primarily exist, and he
was as conspicuously absent on this occasion as Genesis proves him to
have been on the fourth day of creation.

Meanwhile we sat still, and took counsel together. The chief of the
council suddenly presented himself. It was a man in miniature. The
masculine shape, as it loomed up in the distance, gradually separating
itself from the background of villa roofs and casino terraces, resolved
itself into a figure stolid and sturdy, very brown of leg, and insolent
of demeanor--swaggering along as if conscious of there being a
full-grown man buttoned up within a boy's ragged coat. The swagger was
accompanied by a whistle, whose neat crispness announced habits of
leisure and a sense of the refined pleasures of life; for an artistic