aved me a cheery _au revoir_ and returned to the well of the
groaning windlass while I continued on my way through the village.

Outside the squat stone houses, nets were drying in the sun. Save for
the occasional rattle of a passing cart, the village was silent, for
these fisher-folk go barefooted. Presently I reached the public square,
where nothing ever happens, and, turning an iron handle, entered Pont du
Sable's only store. A box of a place, smelling of dried herring,
kerosene, and cheese; and stocked with the plain necessities--almost
everything, from lard, tea, and big nails to soap, tarpaulins, and
applejack. The night's catch of mackerel had been good, and the small
room with its zinc bar was noisy with fisher-folk--wiry fishermen with
legs and chests as hard as iron; slim brown fisher girls as hardy as the
men, capricious, independent and saucy; a race of blonds for the most
part, with the temperament of brunettes. Old women grown gray and
leathery from fighting the sea, and old men too feeble to go--one of
these hung himself last winter because of this.

It was here, too, I found Marianne, dripping wet, in her tarpaulins.

"What luck?" I asked her as I helped myself to a package of cigarettes
from a pigeonhole and laid the payment thereof on the counter.

"_Eh ben!_" she laughed. "We can't complain. If the good God would send
us such fishing every night we should eat well enough."

She strode through the group to the counter to thrust out an empty
bottle.

"Eight sous of the best," she demanded briskly of the mild-eyed grocer.
"My man's as wet as a rat--he needs some fire in him and he'll feel as
fit as a marquis."

A good catch is a tonic to Pont du Sable. Instantly a spirit of good
humour and camaraderie spreads through the village--even old scores are
forgotten. A good haul of mackerel means a let-up in the daily struggle
for existence, which in winter becomes terrible. The sea knows not
charity. It massacres when it can and adds you to the line of dead
things along its edge where you are only remembered by the ebb and flow
of the tide. On blue calm mornings, being part of the jetsam, you may
glisten in the sun beside a water-logged spar; at night you become a
nonentity, of no more consequence along the wavering line of drift than
a rotten gull. But if, like Marianne, you have fought skilfully, you may
again enter Pont du Sable with a quicker eye, a harder body, and a
deeper knowledge of the southwe