; I feel myself quite of the sea already."

The clothes being too small for him, his gaunt legs and bony neck
protruded above and below, capped by a brown, honest, homely face, over
which thin, iron-gray hairs straggled.

"A younger man than I expected to see," thought the Captain; "but that's
one of the faces that never grows old."

M. Jacobus munched his breakfast in silence, and then, clearing a space
on the table, dragged out of his pocket one or two crabs, a sea-horse
finger-length, and a general mess of slimy legs and tails.

"_Cancer pagurus! Cirripedes!_" triumphantly spreading them on the
table-cloth. "The fruits of my morning's labor, except _Hippcampus
brevirostris_, vulgarly called Sea-Horse, which stood to me in the sum
of forty cents: it shall be saved in other modes of expenditure,--say
shoes,"--with a deprecating glance at his wife.

"Yes, Jerome," her eyes fixed, hungrily, on the childish delight in his
face.

Lufflin began to perceive now for what she had worked; he chafed his
whiskers, and entered into the spirit of the thing with zest.

"You'd call me a happy man, now, Mounchere, to be the owner of this bit
of ground, eh?"

"I can conceive," said the Professor, gravely, catching his squirming
prey, and tying them up in a handkerchief,--"I can conceive no better
abode than this for a man of _esprit_,--of what you call stamina in
mind. His wants are little; he rests, he works, he studies books,
Nature. She is greatly good to him in this place; she opens her most
delicate secrets; she gives to him grandeur, beauty, from full hands."

"She fills his stomach, too," said the Captain, hastily. "No better
fishing on the coast, not to mention clams and oysters. Yes, Mounchere,"
after a pause, as they rose from table, "Nature's grand here, as you
say,--or God, which is the same thing. If a man don't come nearer to Him
by a day's outlook on yon sea than by years of town-life, it's because
his eyes aren't worth the having."

M. Jacobus stretched his long neck to look out at the dull, creeping,
moaning waste without, his warm Gallic blood shivering with a vague idea
that the relentless, inexorable Thing was no bad symbol of the Puritan's
God.

"Ah, _le bon Dieu!_" he muttered. "All that is best in men's nature has
been given to make up that image,--and all that is most cruel."

"Eh? yes," said the Captain, not understanding, but wagging his bald
head wisely.

"I will go now and preserve my specime