yellow sands, swaying
palm-trees and curved bays? But here nothing stops your eye. Thought can
fly as rapidly as the winds, spread out, divagate, and lose itself,
without finding anything but water, or perhaps vague America, nameless
islands, or some country with red fruits, humming-birds and savages; or
the silent twilight of the pole, with its spouting whales; or the great
cities lighted by coloured glass, Japan with its porcelain roofs, and
China with its sculptured staircases and its pagodas decorated with
golden bells.

Thus does the mind people and animate this infinity, of which it tires
so soon, in order that it may appear less vast. One cannot think of the
desert without its caravans, of the ocean without its ships, of the
bowels of the earth without evoking the treasures that they are supposed
to conceal.

We returned to Conquet by way of the cliff. The breakers were dashing
against its foot. Driven by a sea-breeze, they would come rushing in,
strike the rocks and cover them with rippling sheets of water. Half an
hour later, in a _char-a-banc_ drawn by two sturdy little horses, we
reached Brest, which we left with pleasure two days afterwards. When you
leave the coast and approach the Channel, the country undergoes a marked
change; it becomes less wild, less Celtic; the dolmens become scarcer,
the flats diminish as the wheat fields grow more numerous, and, little
by little, one reaches the fertile land of Leon, which is, as M.
Pitre-Chevalier has gracefully put it, "the Attica of Brittany."

Landerneau is a place where there is an elm-tree promenade, and where we
saw a frightened dog running through the streets with a pan attached to
its tail.

In order to go to the Chateau de la Joyeuse-Garde, one must first follow
the banks of the Eilorn and then walk through a forest, in a hollow
where few persons go. Sometimes, when the underwood thins out and
meadows appear between the branches, one catches sight of a boat sailing
up the river.

Our guide preceded us at quite a distance. Alone together we trod the
good old earth, flecked with bunches of purple heather and fallen
leaves. The air was perfumed with the breath of violets and
strawberries; slender ferns spread over the trunks of the trees. It was
warm; even the moss was hot. A cuckoo, hidden in the foliage, now and
then gave out its long cry, and gnats buzzed in the glades. We walked on
with a feeling of inward peace, and let our conversation touch on ma