* *

Under the South wall of the island burying-ground is a nameless grave:
where in the summer days fragments of toys and nose-gays are often to be
seen scattered about; for the sunny corner is a favourite play-place,
and the voices of children sound there; and they trample with their
little feet the grass above Marie's grave, and strew wild flowers on it.

IN A BRETON VILLAGE.

PART I.

In a wild and little-known part of the coast of Brittany, where, in
place of sandy beach or cliff, huge granite boulders lie strewn along
the shore, like the ruins of some Titan city, and assuming, here the
features of some uncouth monster, there the outline of some gigantic
fortress, present an aspect of mingled farce and solemnity, and give the
whole region the air of some connection with the under-world,--on this
coast, and low down among the boulders out to sea, stands a little
fishing village.

The granite cottages with their thatched roofs--bits of warm colour
among the bare rocks--lie on a tongue of land between the two inlets of
the sea, which, when the tides run high, nearly cut them off from the
mainland. Opposite the village on the other side of the little inland
sea, is a second cluster of piled-up rocks thrust forth, like the fist
of a giant, to defy the onslaught of Neptune, and on a plateau near the
summit, is the skeleton of a house, built for a summer residence by a
Russian Prince, who had a fancy for solitude and sea air, but abandoned
for some reason before the interior was completed. Solitary and
lifeless, summer and winter, it looks silently down like a wall-eyed
ghost over the waste of rocks and sea.

Below the house and close down by the seashore, is a low, thatched
cottage, built against the rock, which forms its back wall, and on to
which the rough granite blocks of which the cottage is constructed are
rudely cemented with earth and clay; the floor also consists of the
living rock, not levelled, but just as the foot of the wanderer had
trodden it under the winds of heaven for ages before the cottage was
built. In this primitive dwelling--which was not, however, more rude
than many of the fishermen's cottages along the coast--there lived, a
few years since, three persons: old Aimee Kaudren, aged seventy, who
with her snow-white cap and sabots, and her keen clear-cut face, might
have been seen any day in or near the cottage, cutting the gorse-bushes
that grew about the rocks for firing, lead