The Governor's house faces the wharf. The church, the vicarage, the provision warehouse are situated at the same spot; next come the houses of the naval commissary and the harbour-master. From there, the one street of the town runs over the shingles along the beach.
I dined two or three times with the Governor, a very polite and obliging officer. On a sloping bank he grew a few European vegetables. After dinner he showed me what he called his garden. A delicate and fragrant odour of heliotrope was exhaled from a small patch of flowering beans; it was not wafted to us by a gentle breeze from home, but by a wild Newfoundland wind, having no connection with the exiled plant, no sympathy of remembrance or delight. In this perfume no longer inhaled by beauty, purified in its breast, or diffused upon its path, in this perfume of a changed dawn, cultivation and world, lurked all the several melancholies of regrets, absence, and youth.
From the garden we mounted towards the hills, and stopped at the foot of the flag-staff of the look-out. The new French flag waved over our heads; like Virgil's women, we looked at the sea, flentes: it separated us from our native land! The Governor was uneasy: he belonged to the defeated opinion; he was bored, moreover, in this sequestered spot, which was suited to a visionary like myself, but which was a thankless habitation for a man interested in affairs and not endowed with the all-filling passion which causes the rest of the world to disappear from view. My host inquired after the Revolution; I asked him for news of the North-West Passage. He was in the van of the wilderness, but he knew nothing of the Esquimaux and from Canada received nothing save partridges.
One morning I had gone alone to the Cap-à-l'Aigle, or Eagle Head, to see the sun rise in the direction of France. There, a wintry brook formed a cascade which with its last leap reached the sea. I sat down upon a projecting rock, my feet hanging over the water which broke into foam at the bottom of the cliff. A young fisher-girl appeared on the upper slopes of the hill-side; she was bare-legged, in spite of the cold, and walked in the dew. Her black hair was carelessly twisted under the figured silk kerchief bound round her head; over this kerchief she wore a hat made out of the reed-grass of the country and shaped like a cradle or boat. A bunch of purple heather peeped out from her bosom, which was outlined beneath the white material of her shift. From time to time she stooped to gather the leaves of an aromatic plant known in the island as "homegrown tea." With one hand she dropped these leaves into a basket which she carried in the other. She saw me: without being frightened, she came and sat down by me, placed her basket within reach, and began like myself to look at the sun, her legs swinging over the sea.
The fisher-girl.
We remained some minutes without speaking; at last I proved myself the bolder, and asked:
"What are you gathering there? The season for bilberries and atocas is over."
She opened two large, dark, shy, but proud eyes, and answered:
"I was picking tea."
She showed me her basket.