and was conducted to the stone
bridge.

Soon a small company was clustered on the bridge, another band at the
fountain. Then, as there were no more to dance in a circle, the lad
and lassie who had stood in the middle to choose candidates for the
moon and stars clasped hands and danced gayly across the square to the
group of expectant children at the fountain, crying:

"Baradoz! Baradoz!"
(Paradise! Paradise!)

and the whole band charged on the little group on the bridge, shouting
and laughing, while the unfortunate tenants of the supposed infernal
regions fled in every direction, screaming:

"Pater noster
Dibi doub!
Dibi doub!
Dibi doub!"

Their shouts and laughter still came faintly from the tree-shaded
square as I crossed the bridge and walked out into the moorland toward
the sea, where I could see the sun gilding the headland and the
spouting-rocks of Point Paradise.

Over the turning tide cormorants were flying, now wheeling like hawks,
now beating seaward in a duck-like flight. I passed little, lonely
pools on the moor, from which snipe rose with a startling squak!
squak! and darted away inland as though tempest blown.

Presently a blue-gray mass in mid-ocean caught my eye. It was the
island of Groix, and between it and Point Paradise lay an ugly, naked,
black shape, motionless, oozing smoke from two stubby funnels--the
cruiser _Fer-de-Lance_! So solidly inert lay the iron-clad that it did
not seem as if she had ever moved or ever could move; she looked like
an imbedded ledge cropping up out of the sea.

Far across the hilly moorland the white semaphore glistened like a
gull's wing--too far for me to see the balls and cones hoisted or the
bright signals glimmering along the halyards as I followed a trodden
path winding south through the gorse. Then a dip in the moorland hid
the semaphore and at the same moment brought a house into full
view--a large, solid structure of dark stone, heavily Romanesque,
walled in by an ancient buttressed barrier, above which I could see
the tree-tops of a fruit-garden.

The Chateau de Trecourt was a fine example of the so called
"fortified farm"; it had its moat, too, and crumbling wing-walls,
pierced by loop-holes and over-hung with miniature battlements. A
walled and loop-holed passageway connected the house with