FIEL A LA MUERTE, OR TRUE LOVE'S DEVOTION.
A TALE OF THE TIMES OF LOUIS QUINZE.
BY HENRY WILLIAM HERBERT, AUTHOR OF "THE ROMAN TRAITOR," "MARMADUKE WYVIL," "CROMWELL," ETC.
(Continued from page 12.)
PART II.
The castle of St. Renan, like the dwellings of many of the nobles of Bretagne and Gascony, was a superb old pile of solid masonry towering above the huge cliffs which guard the whole of that iron coast with its gigantic masses of rude masonry. So close did it stand to the verge of these precipitous crags on its seaward face, that whenever the wind from the westward blew angrily and in earnest, the spray of the tremendous billows which rolled in from the wide Atlantic, and burst in thunder at the foot of those stern ramparts, was dashed so high by the collision that it would often fall in salt, bitter rain, upon the esplanade above, and dim the diamond-paned casements with its cold mists.
For leagues on either side, as the spectator stood upon the terrace above and gazed out on the expanse of the everlasting ocean, nothing was to be seen but the saliant angles or deep recesses formed by the dark, gray cliffs, unrelieved by any spot of verdure, or even by that line of silver sand at their base, which often intervenes between the rocks of an iron coast and the sea. Here, however, there was no such intermediate step visible; the black face of the rocks sunk sheer and abrupt into the water, which, by its dark green hue indicated to the practiced eye, that it was deep and scarcely fathomable to the very shore.