oups formed on either side of the
fire-place, the vacant space was occupied by the foot of a truckle-bed.
In this bed lay a very old man, the father of Francois Sarzeau. His
haggard face was covered with deep wrinkles; his long white hair flowed
over the coarse lump of sacking which served him for a pillow, and
his light gray eyes wandered incessantly, with a strange expression of
terror and suspicion, from person to person, and from object to object,
in all parts of the room. Whenever the wind and sea whistled and roared
at their loudest, he muttered to himself and tossed his hands fretfully
on his wretched coverlet. On these occasions his eyes always fixed
themselves intently on a little delf image of the Virgin placed in
a niche over the fire-place. Every time they saw him look in this
direction Gabriel and the young girls shuddered and crossed themselves;
and even the child, who still kept awake, imitated their example.
There was one bond of feeling at least between the old man and his
grandchildren, which connected his age and their youth unnaturally and
closely together. This feeling was reverence for the superstitions
which had been handed down to them by their ancestors from centuries
and centuries back, as far even as the age of the Druids. The spirit
warnings of disaster and death which the old man heard in the wailing
of the wind, in the crashing of the waves, in the dreary, monotonous
rattling of the casement, the young man and his affianced wife and the
little child who cowered by the fireside heard too. All differences in
sex, in temperament, in years, superstition was strong enough to strike
down to its own dread level, in the fisherman's cottage, on that stormy
night.

Besides the benches by the fireside and the bed, the only piece of
furniture in the room was a coarse wooden table, with a loaf of black
bread, a knife, and a pitcher of cider placed on it. Old nets, coils
of rope, tattered sails, hung, about the walls and over the wooden
partition which separated the room into two compartments. Wisps of straw
and ears of barley drooped down through the rotten rafters and gaping
boards that made the floor of the granary above.

These different objects, and the persons in the cottage, who composed
the only surviving members of the fisherman's family, were strangely and
wildly lit up by the blaze of the fire and by the still brighter glare
of a resin torch stuck into a block of wood in the chimney-corner. T