small particulars as on important incidents; and making moral
reflections for my benefit at every place where it was possible to
introduce them. In spite, however, of these drawbacks in the telling of
it, the story interested and impressed me in no ordinary degree; and
I now purpose putting the events of it together as skillfully and
strikingly as I can, in the hope that this written version of the
narrative may appeal as strongly to the reader's sympathies as the
spoken version did to mine.

THE NUN'S STORY OF GABRIEL'S MARRIAGE

CHAPTER I.

One night, during the period of the first French Revolution, the family
of Francois Sarzeau, a fisherman of Brittany, were all waking and
watching at a late hour in their cottage on the peninsula of Quiberon.
Francois had gone out in his boat that evening, as usual, to fish.
Shortly after his departure, the wind had risen, the clouds had
gathered; and the storm, which had been threatening at intervals
throughout the whole day, burst forth furiously about nine o'clock.
It was now eleven; and the raging of the wind over the barren, heathy
peninsula still seemed to increase with each fresh blast that tore its
way out upon the open sea; the crashing of the waves on the beach was
awful to hear; the dreary blackness of the sky terrible to behold. The
longer they listened to the storm, the oftener they looked out at it,
the fainter grew the hopes which the fisherman's family still strove to
cherish for the safety of Francois Sarzeau and of his younger son who
had gone with him in the boat.

There was something impressive in the simplicity of the scene that was
now passing within the cottage.

On one side of the great, rugged, black fire-place crouched two little
girls; the younger half asleep, with her head in her sister's lap. These
were the daughters of the fisherman; and opposite to them sat their
eldest brother, Gabriel. His right arm had been badly wounded in a
recent encounter at the national game of the _Soule_, a sport resembling
our English foot-ball; but played on both sides in such savage earnest
by the people of Brittany as to end always in bloodshed, often in
mutilation, sometimes even in loss of life. On the same bench with
Gabriel sat his betrothed wife--a girl of eighteen--clothed in the
plain, almost monastic black-and-white costume of her native district.
She was the daughter of a small farmer living at some little distance
from the coast. Between the gr