icturesque.

The marsh at Pont du Sable was an old friend of mine. So were the desert
beach beyond the dunes, and the lost fishing-village--"no longer than
your arm." I had tramped in wind and rain and the good sunlight over
that great desert of pasty black clay at low tide. I had lain at high
tide in a sand-pit at the edge of the open sea beyond the dunes, waiting
for chance shots at curlew and snipe. I had known the bay at the first
glimmer of dawn with a flight of silver plovers wheeling for a rush over
my decoys. Dawn--the lazy, sparkling noon and the golden hours before
the crisp, still twilight warned me it was high time to start back to
Bar la Rose fourteen kilometres distant. All these had become enchanting
memories.

Thus going to Pont du Sable for a day's shooting became a weekly
delight, then a biweekly fascination, then an incorrigible triweekly
habit. There was no alternative left me now but to live there. The
charm of that wild bay and its lost village had gotten under my skin.
And thus it happened that I deserted my farm and friends at Bar la Rose,
and with my goods and chattels boarded the toy train one spring morning,
bound for my abandoned house, away from sufficient-unto-itself Bar la
Rose and its pigheaded inhabitants, the butcher, the blacksmith, and the
mayor.

* * * * *

It is such a funny little train that runs to my new-found Paradise,
rocking and puffing and grumbling along on its narrow-gauge track with
its cars labelled like grown-up ones, first, second, and third class;
and no two painted the same colour; and its noisy, squat engine like the
real ones in the toy-stores, that wind up with a key and go rushing off
frantically in tangents. No wonder the train to my lost village is
called "_Le petit deraillard_"--"The little get-off-the-track." And so I
say, it might all have come packed in excelsior in a neat box, complete,
with instructions, for the sum of four francs sixty-five centimes, had
it not been otherwise destined to run twice daily, rain or shine, to
Pont du Sable, and beyond.

Poor little train! It is never on time, but it does its best. It is at
least far more prompt than its passengers, for most of them come running
after it out of breath.

"Hurry up, mademoiselle!" cries the engineer to a rosy-cheeked girl in
sabots, rushing with a market-basket under one arm and a live goose
under the other. "Eh, my little lady, you should have gotten out of