The sunshine of yesterday had departed and the high wind of the night was no more. It was typical Brittany weather and the whole country was enveloped in the same immense grey cloud. The light was the light of twilight, and was so pale and wan that it seemed that it had not strength enough to enter through the little windows of the cottages. Of distant things one could distinguish nothing; a fine drizzle, like a watery dust, filled the air.
We had to make the promised round of visits to uncles, cousins, old friends of boyhood; and these little homesteads were very scattered, for Plouherzel is not a village, but a region around a chapel.
Often we had far to walk, along muddy lanes, between moss-covered banks, under the vault of old dead beech trees and under the veil of the grey sky.
And all these cottages were alike, low, sunk in the earth, gloomy; their thatched roof, their rough granite walls, made green with scurvy grass, with lichen and the fresh moss of winter. Within, dark, primitive, with press-beds protected by pictures of the saints or statues of the Blessed Virgin.
We were received everywhere in most cordial fashion, and everywhere we needs must eat and drink. There were long conversations in Breton, with which, in my honour, was mingled, with indifferent success, a little French. It was of the childhood of Yves that these good people loved most to talk. Dear old men and dear old women recounted with glee the pranks he used to play; and, by all accounts, they were very numerous.
"Oh! he was a terrible fellow, you may take our word for it!"
Yves received these compliments with his big, placid air and drank at every opportunity.
The devil-may-care sea-rover was taking shape already, it seemed, in the heart of the little wild boy; the little Yves, who ran barefoot about these lanes of Plouherzel, was the unconscious germ of the sailor of later days, wild, truant, uncontrollable.
Towards evening, at low tide, we descended, Yves and I, into the bed of the salt-water lake, into the meadow of brown seaweed. We carried, each of us, a slice of black bread well buttered, and a large knife for opening shell-fish. A feast of his boyhood which he wanted to renew with me: shell-fish eaten raw with bread and butter.
The sea had receded for many miles, laying bare the vast fields of seaweed, the deep meadow in which the herbage was brown and briny, with strange living flowers. All around, granite walls enclosed this immense pond, and the isle shaped like a couchant beast, stripped to its feet, disclosed the bottom of its black base. There were many other granite blocks also, which had been hidden under water at high tide and now were visible, rising up, with their long trimmings of seaweed hanging like wet bedraggled hair. On the mournful plain many of them might be seen scattered all about, in strange attitudes of awakening.