my father would have to beg. I am forced to take a
business which only needs a little knack and a great deal of patience."

"But how can two persons live on twelve sous a day?"

"Oh, monsieur, we eat cakes made of buckwheat, and barnacles which I get
off the rocks."

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-seven."

"Did you ever leave Croisic?"

"I went once to Guerande to draw for the conscription; and I went to
Savenay to the messieurs who measure for the army. If I had been half
an inch taller they'd have made me a soldier. I should have died of my
first march, and my poor father would to-day be begging his bread."

I had thought out many dramas; Pauline was accustomed to great emotions
beside a man so suffering as myself; well, never had either of
us listened to words so moving as these. We walked on in silence,
measuring, each of us, the silent depths of that obscure life, admiring
the nobility of a devotion which was ignorant of itself. The strength
of that feebleness amazed us; the man's unconscious generosity belittled
us. I saw that poor being of instinct chained to that rock like a
galley-slave to his ball; watching through twenty years for shell-fish
to earn a living, and sustained in his patience by a single sentiment.
How many hours wasted on a lonely shore! How many hopes defeated by
a change of weather! He was hanging there to a granite rock, his arm
extended like that of an Indian fakir, while his father, sitting in
their hovel, awaited, in silence and darkness, a meal of the coarsest
bread and shell-fish, if the sea permitted.

"Do you ever drink wine?" I asked.

"Three or four times a year," he replied.

"Well, you shall drink it to-day,--you and your father; and we will send
you some white bread."

"You are very kind, monsieur."

"We will give you your dinner if you will show us the way along the
shore to Batz, where we wish to see the tower which overlooks the bay
between Batz and Croisic."

"With pleasure," he said. "Go straight before you, along the path you
are now on, and I will follow you when I have put away my tackle."

We nodded consent, and he ran off joyfully toward the town. This meeting
maintained us in our previous mental condition; but it lessened our gay
lightheartedness.

"Poor man!" said Pauline, with that accent which removes from the
compassion of a woman all that is mortifying in human pity, "ought we
not to feel ashamed of our happiness in presence of such misery?"

"Not