others, I was always aware of his gentle, protecting presence, and happy when his peaceful gaze rested upon me. After long years of separation and in our great old age we discovered, France and I, that we had always been dear friends, and in the few years that remained to us before his recent death we saw each other constantly. But I must return to the fête. My mother and my aunt were absorbed in preparations. It was a general hurly-burly, every one running north, south, east, and west--to Landerneau, to Morlaix, to Brest, to every place, in short, that could boast some special delicacy. And at last the great day came, and we children were up with the lark. There was first to be a luncheon for the huntsmen, friends of papa's, and the ladies were to follow in carriages and to enter Ker-Eliane from the highroad. But we preferred the shorter way, by the deep paths overgrown with hawthorn and blackberry. The boys rushed along on the tops of the _talus_, the sort of steep bank that in Brittany takes the place of hedges, and even with Jeannie to restrain me I was nearly as torn and tattered as they when we arrived at Ker-Eliane. What a fairy-land it was! Rocks and streams, heathery hills, and woods full of bracken. An old ruin, strange and melancholy, with only a few crumbling walls and a portion of ivy-clothed tower left standing, rose among trees on a little hill near the entrance, and farther on, surrounded by woods of beech or pine, were three lakes, lying in a chain one after the other. Water-lilies grew upon them, and at their brinks a pinkish-purple flower the name of which I never knew. The third lake was so somber and mysterious that my father had called it the Styx. An ancient laurel-tree--in Brittany the laurels become immense trees--had been uprooted in a thunderstorm and had fallen across the Styx, making a natural rustic bridge. We children were forbidden to cross on it, but on this day I remember my adventurous cousin Jules rushing to and fro from one bank to the other in defiance of authority. At the foot of the hill, below the ruin, a clear, delicious stream sprang forth from a stony cleft and wound through a valley and out into the lower meadows, and at the entrance to the valley, among heather and enormous mossy rocks, rose a cross of gray stone without Christ or ornaments. The peasants made pilgrimages to it on Good Friday, but I never learned its history.