“Are you sure?”
“Yes, sure.”
The next day the Class was overtaken, while travelling in the French coach, by a pouring rain. Tommy, as usual, was on the seat with the driver. He became very impatient, saying, every few minutes, “I wish it would stop raining, I wish—” this, that, and the other thing.
“Tommy,” said Master Lewis, from within the coach, “are you sure?”
After a time the sunlight overspread the landscape, making the watery leaves shine like the multitudinous wavelets of the sea.
Tommy’s merry voice was heard again, talking bad French.
“Contentment and happiness,” said Master Lewis to Frank, “have evidently returned again.”
From Avranches the Class visited that wonderful castle, church, and village of the sea, Mont St. Michel.
The journey from the mainland was by a tramway across the Grève, or sands, at low tide. At neap tides the Mount is not surrounded by water at any time, but at spring tides it is washed by the sea twice a day, and sometimes seems like a partly sunken hill in the sea. The fortress is girt about the base with feudal walls and towers colored by the sea; above these rises a little town, the houses being set on broken ledges of rock; above the town stand the fortifications, and a church and its tower crown all. It is one of the most curious places in the world.
Pagan priests here worshipped the god of high places; monks succeeded them; Henry II held court here, then it became a place to which saints made yearly pilgrimages. The Revolution drove out the monks, and turned it into a prison. In an iron cage called the Cage of St. Michel, a torturous contrivance, state prisoners used to be confined.