nies. We looked
at each other, grieving mutually that we had not at that moment the
power to dip into the treasury of Aboul Casem. But we saw a splendid
lobster and a crab fastened to a string which the fisherman was dangling
in his right hand, while with the left he held his tackle and his net.

We accosted him with the intention of buying his haul,--an idea which
came to us both, and was expressed in a smile, to which I responded by
a slight pressure of the arm I held and drew toward my heart. It was one
of those nothings of which memory makes poems when we sit by the fire
and recall the hour when that nothing moved us, and the place where
it did so,--a mirage the effects of which have never been noted down,
though it appears on the objects that surround us in moments when life
sits lightly and our hearts are full. The loveliest scenery is that we
make ourselves. What man with any poesy in him does not remember some
mere mass of rock, which holds, it may be, a greater place in his memory
than the celebrated landscapes of other lands, sought at great cost.
Beside that rock, tumultuous thoughts! There a whole life evolved; there
all fears dispersed; there the rays of hope descended to the soul! At
this moment, the sun, sympathizing with these thoughts of love and of
the future, had cast an ardent glow upon the savage flanks of the rock;
a few wild mountain flowers were visible; the stillness and the silence
magnified that rugged pile,--really sombre, though tinted by the
dreamer, and beautiful beneath its scanty vegetation, the warm
chamomile, the Venus' tresses with their velvet leaves. Oh, lingering
festival; oh, glorious decorations; oh, happy exaltation of human
forces! Once already the lake of Brienne had spoken to me thus. The rock
of Croisic may be perhaps the last of these my joys. If so, what will
become of Pauline?

"Have you had a good catch to-day, my man?" I said to the fisherman.

"Yes, monsieur," he replied, stopping and turning toward us the swarthy
face of those who spend whole days exposed to the reflection of the sun
upon the water.

That face was an emblem of long resignation, of the patience of a
fisherman and his quiet ways. The man had a voice without harshness,
kind lips, evidently no ambition, and something frail and puny about
him. Any other sort of countenance would, at that moment, have jarred
upon us.

"Where shall you sell your fish?"

"In the town."

"How much will they pay you fo