"Dear brother, I have to tell you that little Pierre was taken ill with colic as a result of eating too many berries in the woods, on that last Sunday when we were at Toulven; but he got over it. He is becoming a dear little chap, and I spend hours playing with him. In the evening all three of us go for a walk together; we never go out now unless we go together, and when one returns the other two return also! "Dear brother, if only you were back in Brest, I should have everything I want; and you would see me now as I am, and you would be very pleased with me; for never have I been so peaceful. "I should like to go away with you again, my dear brother, and to find myself on a ship bound for the Levant where I might find you. This is not to say that I do not want to continue the life I am now living, for I assure you I do. But that is not possible, because I am too happy. "I end in embracing you with all my heart. Little Pierre sends his love; my wife and all my relations at Toulven ask to be remembered to you. They look forward to seeing you and I can promise you so do I. "Your brother, "YVES KERMADEC." CHAPTER LXXVII TOULVEN, _October_, 1881. Pale Brittany once more in autumn sunshine! Once more the old Breton lanes, the beech trees and the heather! I thought I had said good-bye to this country for many a long day, and coming back to it I am filled with a strange melancholy. My return has been sudden, unexpected, as the returns and the departures of sailors so often are. A fine October day, a warm sun, a thin white mist spread like a veil over the countryside. All about is that immense peace which is peculiar to the fine days of autumn; in the air a savour of dampness and of fallen leaves, a pervading sense of the dying year. I am in the well-known woods of Trémeulé, on the height overlooking all the region of Toulven. Below me, the lake, motionless under this floating mist, and, in the distance, wooded horizons, as they must have been in the ancient days of Gaul. And those who are with me, sitting among the thousand little flowerets of the heather, are my Breton friends, my brother Yves and little Pierre, his son. It has become in some sort my own country, this Toulven. A few short years ago it was unknown to me, and Yves, for all that even then I called him brother, scarcely counted for me. The aspects of life change, things happen, are transformed, and pass. The heather is so thick that, in the distance, it looks as if the ground were covered with a reddish carpet. The tardy scabious are still in flower, on the top of their long stalks; and the first of the heavy rains have already littered the earth with dead leaves.