t
easily pass as an English sailor, and the English speech came almost as
readily to my tongue as my own. It was with vague hopes in that direction,
and also as a means of passing the long dull days, that I began carving
bits of bone into odd shapes, and, when suitable pieces offered, into
snuffboxes, which I sold to the country-folk who came in with provisions.
At first my rough attempts produced but pence, and then, as greater skill
came with practice, shillings, and so I began to accumulate a small store
of money against the time I should need it outside.

In building the prison in so marshy a district, advantage had been taken of
a piece of rising ground. The enclosure was built round it, so that the
middle stood somewhat higher than the sides, and standing on that highest
part one could see over the sharp teeth of the stockade and all round the
countryside.

That wide view was not without a charm of its own, though its long dull
levels grew wearisome to eyes accustomed only to the bold headlands and
sharp scarps of Sercq, or to the ever-changing sea. For miles all round
were marshes where nothing seemed to grow but tussocks of long wiry grass,
with great pools and channels of dark water in between. Far away beyond
them there were clumps of trees in places, and farther away still one saw
here and there the spire of a church a great way off.

When we came there the wiry grass was yellow and drooping, like bent and
rusted bayonets, and the pools were black and sullen, and the sky was gray
and lowering and very dismal. And in Sercq the rocks were golden in the
sunshine, the headlands were great soft cushions of velvet turf, the
heather purpled all the hillsides, and the tall bracken billowed under the
west wind. And on the gray rocks below, the long waves flung themselves in
a wild abandon of delight, and shouted aloud because they were free.

Then the east winds came, and all the face of things blanched like the face
of death, with coarse hairs sticking up out of it here and there. The pools
and ditches were white with ice, and all the countryside lay stiff and
stark, a prisoner bound in chains and iron. To stand there looking at it
for even five minutes made one's backbone rattle for half a day. And yet,
even then, in Sercq the sun shone soft and warm, the sky and sea were blue,
the fouaille was golden-brown on the hillside, the young gorse was showing
pale on the Eperquerie, and the Butcher's Broom on Tintageu was