Of course you must make this excursion in good company, and I affirm that I was in the very best. The company prefers, equally of course, to have its breakfast in the orchard in front of the house; which, if the repast is good, will make it seem better still, and if it is poor, will carry off its poorness. Clever innkeepers should always make their victims (in tolerable weather) eat in the garden. I forget whether Ernestine's breakfast was intrinsically good or bad, but I distinctly remember enjoying it, and making everything welcome. Everything, that is, save the party at the other table--the Paris actresses and the American gentlemen. The combination of these two classes of persons, individually so delightful, results in certain phenomena which seem less in harmony with appleboughs and summer breezes than with the gas lamps and thick perfumes of a _cabinet particulier_, and yet it was characteristic of this odd mixture of things that Mlle. Ernestine, coming to chat with her customers, should bear a beautiful infant on her arm, and smile with artless pride on being assured of its filial resemblance to herself. She looked decidedly handsome as she caressed this startling attribute of quiet spinsterhood. St. Jouin is close to the sea and to the finest cliffs in the world. One of my companions, who had laden the carriage with his painting traps, went off into a sunny meadow to take the portrait of a windmill, and I, choosing the better portion, wandered through a little green valley with the other. Ten minutes brought us to the edge of the cliffs, which at this point of the coast are simply sublime. I had been thinking the white sea-walls of Etretal the finest thing conceivable in this way, but the huge red porphoritic-looking masses of St. Jouin have an even grander character. I have rarely seen anything more picturesque. They are strange, fantastic, out of keeping with the country, and for some rather arbitrary reason suggested to me a Spanish or even African landscape. Certain sun-scorched precipices in Spanish Sierras must have very much the same warmth of tone and desolation of attitude. A very picturesque feature of the cliffs of St. Jouin is that they are double in height, as one may say. Falling to an immense depth, they encounter a certain outward ledge, or terrace, where they pause and play a dozen fantastic tricks, such as piling up rocks into the likeness of needles and watch-towers; then they plunge again, and in another splendid sweep descend to the beach. There was something very impressive in the way their evil brows, looking as if they were all stained with blood and rust, were bent upon the blue expanse of the sleeping sea. III.