my grandmother's and aunt's also, which they had quitted twenty years
before my birth to establish themselves upon the main land. The Island,
or the least thing that came from it, had a singular charm for me.

It was quite near us, for from a garret window at the top of the house
we could, upon a very clear day, see the extreme end of its extensive
plain; it appeared a little bluish line against a still paler one which
was the arm of the ocean separating us from it. . . . To get to it we
had to take a long journey in wretched country wagons and in sailing
boats; and often our boat had to make its way there in the teeth of
a strong gale. At this time in the village of St. Pierre Oleron I had
three old aunts who lived very modestly upon the revenues of their salt
marshes (the remains of a once great inheritance), and their annual
rents which the peasants still paid with sacks of wheat. . . . When I
went to visit them at St. Pierre there was for me a certain joy, mingled
with many kinds of conflicting emotions, which I cannot explain, in
trying to picture to myself their once great station.

The Huguenot austerity of their manners, their mode of life, their house
and their furniture all belonged to a past time, to a bygone generation.
The sea surrounded and isolated us, and the wind constantly swept over
the moorland and over the great stretches of sandy beach.

My nurse was also from the Island, of a Huguenot family, which
descending from father to son had been with us for a long time; and she
would say: "At home, on the Island," in such a way that with a wave of
emotion I understood her great homesickness for it.

We had about us a number of little articles that had come from there,
and which had places of honor in our home. We had some black pebbles
large as cannon-balls, that had been chosen from the thousands lying
on the Long-Beach because centuries of washing had polished and rounded
them exquisitely. These pebbles always played an important part every
winter evening, for with the greatest regularity the old people would
put them into the chimney-place where a wood fire blazed and crackled;
afterwards they slipped them into calico bags of a flowered pattern,
also brought from the Island, and took them to bed where they served to
keep their feet warm during the night.

In our cellar we had wooden props and firkins, and also a number of
straight elm poles for holding the washing which had been cut from the
choices