_Couleur de rose_ will ever gild our memory of Port Meullin. It was the scene of our first grand impression of the extreme beauty of Serque; but it was gilded by a sentiment somewhat beyond mere admiration. From another point, a very courteous gentleman left his islet villa, and his lady and his luncheon, and guided us to the descent, where a bevy of fair girls, in all the romance of elegant deshabille, were gathering weed and pebbles among the rocks. Charming! Look across from Port Meullin to Havre Gosselin; there is a green fissure in the cliff 200 feet in height, as if the rocks had quarrelled and fallen away from each other—it is the _Moie du Mouton_, and along it sheep are lifted to browse on the green down above. [Illustration: LA COUPÉ] And there on the right stretches the bold isolated rock, _Brechou_, or L’Isle de Merchant, a table of rich mould on a belt of flat rock. On its southern side yawns a very lofty chasm. We longed to pore into it; but the currents daunted even the boatmen of Serque. Round the point of Lionee opens the wide bay of Le Grand Grève, divided from the opposite bay by that most eccentric wall of rock 200 feet high and 6 feet thick on its ridge. This _coupée_, thus pared down for safety and for traffic, is chiefly of sienite or hornblende granite, traversed by a vein of porcelain clay, and it divides the islet into Great and Little Serk. This, perhaps prudent cutting down, has, however, shorn the guide-books of the high-flown epithets of “awe” and “terror,” which they affirm must strike the adventurer from Great to Little Serk. This peninsula, _presq’île du petit Serque_—wears a dreary aspect on its face; yet parterres of the most splendid ericas here and there adorn its soil—a little nest of cots and some scattered ruins of miners’ huts display a curious contrast of vitality and desertion. The southern point is the mining district; and though they have quite abandoned the search for ore, the superficial barrenness is perfectly consistent with mineral impregnation below. Our research for mollusca was more fertile in the pools about the southern point than elsewhere. As we round the point we come on a little bay, the avant courier of a splendid succession of coves and clefts on the eastern coast, and lying off this southern point peers up the bold rock _L’Etat du Serq_. Every brow on this deeply indented shore should be rounded and scaled and descended, as far as the worn or stony path can be traced, and then we look directly on the face of the cliff and _into_ the caverns. There is one cave especially, called, we believe, _Le Pot_, as fine as can be imagined—the boldest feature of Little Serk, and on these rock-brows the lichens are in beautiful profusion, and the grey and yellow cetraria, and the fleshy _sycophorus deformis_.