The afternoon sun etched our shadows on the whitewashed wall behind us. Acres of grain and gorse turned the moorland golden under a windy blue sky. In front of us the Bay of Biscay burned sapphire to the horizon. "You men of the sea," I said, "attain a greater growth of soul than do we whose roots are in the land. You are men of wider spiritual vision, of deeper capacity than are we." The coastguard's weather-beaten visage altered subtly. "How can that be, Monsieur? Our sins stalk us like vast red shadows. We live violently, we men of the sea." "But you really LIVE--spiritually and physically. You attain a spiritual growth, a vision, an understanding, a depth seldom reached by us:--a wide kindness, a charity, a noble humanity outside the circumference of our experience." He said, looking seaward out of vague, sea-gray eyes: "We drink too deeply. We love too often. We men of the sea have great need of intercession and of prayer." "Not YOU." "There was a girl at Rosporden.... And one at Bannalec.... And others...from the ends of the earth to the ends of it...We Icelanders drank deep. And afterwards...in the China seas...." His gray Breton eyes brooded on the flowing sapphire of the sea; the low sun painted his furrowed face red. "Not one among you but lays down his life for others as quietly and simply as he fills his pipe. From the rocking mizzen you look down calmly upon the world of men tossing with petty and complex passions--look down with the calm, kindly comprehension of a mature soul which has learned something of Immortal toleration. The scheme of things is clearer to you than to us; your pity, wiser; our faith more logical." "We are children," he muttered, "we men of the sea." I have tried to say so--in too many words," said I. My dog looked up at me, then with a slight sigh settled himself again beside the game bag and tucked his nose under his flank. On the whitewashed walls of the ancient, ruined fort behind us our shadows towered in the red sunset. I turned and looked at the roofless, crumbling walls, then at the coast where jeweled surf tumbled, stained with crimson. These shores had been washed with a redder stain in years gone by: these people were forever stamped with the eradicable scar of suffering borne by generations dead. The centuries had never spared them. And, as I brooded there, watching two peasants, father and son, grubbing out the gorse below us to make a place for future wheat, the rose surf beyond seemed full of little rosy children and showy women, species of the endless massacres that this sad land had endlessly endured. "They struck you hard and deep," I said, thinking of the past. "Deep, Monsieur," he replied, understanding me. "Deep as your people's hatred." "Oh, poor ça"--he made a vague gesture. "The dead are dead," he said, leaning over and opening my game bag to look into it and sort and count the few braces of partridge, snipe and widgeon.