d across the wide salt marsh
that stretched its feathery fingers to the open sea.

A lone, wrinkled fisherman, rolling lazily on the mighty heave of the
incoming tide, turned his head landward.

"_Sapristi!_" he grinned, as he slipped a slimy thumb from the meshes of
a mackerel-net and crossed himself. "She has a hoarse throat, that
little one."

Far up the hillside a mile back of the churchyard, a barelegged girl
driving a cow stopped to listen, her hood pushed back, her brown hands
crossed upon her breast.

Lower down, skirting the velvet edge of the marsh, filmy rifts of mist
broke into shreds or blended with the spirals of blue smoke mounting
skyward from freshly kindled fires.

Pont du Sable was awake for the day.

It is the most unimportant of little villages, yet it is four centuries
old, and of stone. It seems to have shrivelled by its great age, like
its oldest inhabitants. One-half of its two score of fishermen's houses
lie crouched to the rambling edge of its single street; the other half
might have been dropped at random, like stones from the pocket of some
hurrying giant. Some of these, including the house of the ruddy little
mayor and the polite, florid grocer, lie spilled along the edge of the
marsh.

As for Monsieur le Cure, he was at this very moment in the small stone
church saying mass to five fishermen, two devout housewives, a little
child, an old woman in a white cap, and myself. Being in my
shooting-boots, I had tiptoed into a back seat behind two of the
fishermen, and sat in silence watching Monsieur le Cure's gaunt figure
and listening to his deep, well-modulated, resonant voice.

What I saw was a man uncommonly tall and well built, dressed in a rusty
black soutane that reached in straight lines from beneath his chin to
his feet, which were encased in low calf shoes with steel buckles. I
noticed, too, that his face was angular and humorous; his eyes keen and
merry by turns; his hair of the colourless brown one sees among
fisherfolk whose lives are spent in the sun and rain. I saw, too, that
he was impecunious, for the front edges of his cassock were frayed and
three buttons missing, not to be wondered at, I said to myself, as I
remembered that the stone church, like the village it comforted, had
always been poor.

Now and then during the mass I saw the cure glance at the small leaded
window above him as if making a mental note of the swaying tree-tops
without in the graveyard. Then h