At wide intervals were straw-thatched cottages, green with moss, half buried in the earth and the dead branches. The trees were stunted, stripped by the winter, twisted by the wind from the sea. Not a soul in sight and silence everywhere. A chapel of grey granite with an enclosure of beeches and tombs. . . . Ah! yes, I recognize it without ever having seen it, the chapel of Plouherzel! Yves had often spoken of it to me on board during the night watch, during the clear nights at the other side of the world, when we used to dream of home. "When you reach the chapel," he used to say, "it is quite near; you have but to turn into the path on the left, and two hundred yards away is our home." I turned to the left and, by the side of the little road, I saw the cottage. It was solitary, quite low and overshadowed by old beech trees. It looked out upon a mournful expanse of country, the distances of which were shaded in dark grey. There were interminable, monotonous plains with phantoms of trees; a salt water lake at the hour of low water, an empty lake hollowed out of the granite strata, a deep meadow of seaweed, with an island in the middle. A strange island, formed of a single piece of polished granite, like a back, having the shape of a large beast sitting. One looked about for the sea, the real sea which with the returning tide must come to fill these abandoned reservoirs, but there was no sign of it anywhere. A cold dark mist was rising on the horizon, and the winter sunshine was beginning to fade. Poor Yves! So this is his home; a lonely cottage by the roadside; a poor little Breton cottage, in a turning off a remote lane, low-pitched, under a lowering sky, half buried in the earth, with ancient little granite walls overgrown with parietaries and moss. All his memories of childhood are centred here; it was his cradle, his nest; a cherished home in which his mother lived, a home to which, in far-off countries, in the great cities of America and Asia, his imagination always brought him back. He thought of it with love, of this little corner of the world, during the fine calm nights at sea and during the riotous nights of brutal pleasure which made up his life of adventure. A poor, lonely cottage, at the turning of a road, and that was all. In his dreams at sea it was this that he saw: under a threatening sky, amid the mournful country of this land of Goëlo, these old damp little walls overgrown with parietaries; and the neighbouring cottages in which kind old women in white Breton head-dresses used to spoil him when he was a child; and then, at the corner of the roads, the granite calvaries, corroded by the centuries. . . . Merciful heavens! How dreary this country is! How dreary and how depressing! I knocked at the door and a young girl who resembled Yves appeared on the threshold. I asked her if this was indeed the house of the Kermadecs. "Yes," she said, a little surprised and apprehensive. And then, suddenly: