Leisure it was, most rare and ethereal! We had nothing on earth to do but to walk out, and walk in again, and look at each other all day long. The interminable stretches of strand we paced, hour after hour; the old wooden huts on the beach, white as silver, that the sea used to beat against every day, leaving little crests of foam in the hollows between them, to glisten there for a moment, till the sand sucked them up; the row of marine cottages, with pea-green shutters, and small gardens in front, boxed up with tarred railings, and cut in the centre by a single walk, strewn all over with the dust and fragments of shells; the single bathing-machine that served the whole village, and seemed even too much for it, and that looked as if it had never moved out of the one spot, with its rusty wheels half buried in the drift of gravel and sea-weed--all such little unchangeable items of that marvelous leisure are strongly impressed upon me. It would have been very dreary if we had not had something in ourselves to fall back upon; and as long as that lasted, we bore up against the flatness and sameness of our lives. The sea, of all things, grows heavy and wearing to people whose constitutions are not capable of drinking in health and elasticity from its exhilarating breezes. There is nothing so monotonous as the wailing and lashing sea, especially in the night time, when darkness covers it, and its presence is announced only by that eternal surging and moaning of the waters which strike upon the invalided fancy like the cries of suffering spirits. The seaboard population on the coast of Brittany have an ocean superstition which exactly answers to this interpretation of the peculiar melancholy of the waves, soughing and pining along the beach at night. We liked this solitude at first. It left us entirely to ourselves, which was precisely the ideal life we had yearned for. The same objects every day in our walks--the same objects every moment to look out upon from our windows--the same faces, few or none, on the desolate sands--the very same sky, with hardly any variation, although the slightest fluctuation in the points of the wind, or the current of the clouds, produced a sensation! It suited us at first, for we had no space in our thoughts for external objects, and the total absence of all excitement threw us more in upon ourselves. But even then it was sad. Such days of idleness--such idle dalliance--such a happy negation of all action and effort! How long was this to last? or rather, how long could such a life last for two people who felt within themselves aspirations for movement and results of some kind?