de on muddy banks, and a little arm of the sea
which separates the mainland from the island of Croisic. Geographically,
Croisic is really a peninsula; but as it holds to Brittany only by the
beaches which connect it with the village of Batz (barren quicksands
very difficult to cross), it may be more correct to call it an island.

At the point where the road from Croisic to Guerande turns off from
the main road of _terra firma_, stands a country-house, surrounded by
a large garden, remarkable for its trimmed and twisted pine-trees, some
being trained to the shape of sun-shades, others, stripped of their
branches, showing their reddened trunks in spots where the bark has
peeled. These trees, victims of hurricanes, growing against wind and
tide (for them the saying is literally true), prepare the mind for the
strange and depressing sight of the marshes and dunes, which resemble
a stiffened ocean. The house, fairly well built of a species of slaty
stone with granite courses, has no architecture; it presents to the eye
a plain wall with windows at regular intervals. These windows have small
leaded panes on the ground-floor and large panes on the upper floor.
Above are the attics, which stretch the whole length of an enormously
high pointed roof, with two gables and two large dormer windows on each
side of it. Under the triangular point of each gable a circular window
opens its cyclopic eye, westerly to the sea, easterly on Guerande. One
facade of the house looks on the road to Guerande, the other on the
desert at the end of which is Croisic; beyond that little town is the
open sea. A brook escapes through an opening in the park wall which
skirts the road to Croisic, crosses the road, and is lost in the sands
beyond it.

The grayish tones of the house harmonize admirably with the scene
it overlooks. The park is an oasis in the surrounding desert, at
the entrance of which the traveller comes upon a mud-hut, where the
custom-house officials lie in wait for him. This house without land (for
the bulk of the estate is really in Guerande) derives an income from
the marshes and a few outlying farms of over ten thousand francs a year.
Such is the fief of Les Touches, from which the Revolution lopped
its feudal rights. The _paludiers_, however, continue to call it "the
chateau," and they would still say "seigneur" if the fief were not now
in the female line. When Felicite set about restoring Les Touches, she
was careful, artist that