Half an hour later, from our chamber windows we looked forth through
the dusk across at the mussel bed. The great mud-bank, all that black
acreage of slime and sea-weed, the eager, struggling band of toiling
fish wives, all was gone; it was all as if it had not been--would never
be again. The water hissed along the beach; it broke in rhythmic,
sonorous measure against the parapet. Surely there had never been any
beds, or any mussels, or any toiling fish-wives; or if there had, it
was all a world that the sea had washed up, and then as quietly, as
heedlessly, as pitilessly had obliterated.

It was the very epitome of life itself.




CHAPTER V.

THE VILLAGE.


Our visit to the mussel-bed, as we soon found, had been our formal
introduction to the village. Henceforth every door step held a friend;
not a coif or a blouse passed without a greeting. The village, as a
village, lived in the open street. Villerville had the true French
genius for society; the very houses were neighborly, crowding close
upon the narrow sidewalk. Conversation, to be carried on from a
dormer-window or from opposite sides of the street, had evidently been
the first architectural consideration in the mind of the builders; doors
and windows must be as open and accessible as the lives of the
inhabitants. The houses themselves appeared to be regarded in the light