Our horses were rested at a fishing-village on Cancale Beach. We next went through the marshes and the fever-stricken town of Dol, and after passing the gate of the college to which I was soon to return, we plunged inland. For four mortal hours we saw nothing but heaths wreathed with woods, wastes scarce touched with the hoe, fields sown with poor, black, stunted corn, and poverty-stricken patches of oats. Charcoal-burners led teams of small horses with long and shaggy manes; lank-haired peasants in goat-skin great-coats drove lean bullocks with shrill cries or tramped behind a heavy plough, like laboring fauns. At last we caught sight of a valley at the bottom of which, not far from a pond, ascended the spire of a village church; the towers of a feudal castle rose amid the trees of a wood illumined by the setting sun. I have been obliged to stop: my heart was beating so violently as almost to push back the table at which I am writing. The recollections awakened in my memory overpower me with their number and their force: and yet, what are they to the rest of the world? After descending the hill, we forded a stream, drove on for half-an-hour, and then turned out of the high-road. The carriage rolled along a quincunx in an avenue of yoke-elms, whose crowns were interwoven above our heads: I still remember the moment at which I entered their shade and the feeling of affrighted gladness which I experienced. On emerging from the darkness of the woods, we crossed a fore-court planted with walnut-trees, adjoining the house and garden of the steward; thence we passed, through a stone gateway, into a grassy court called the _Cour Verte._ On the right were a long row of stables and a clump of chesnut-trees; on the left, another clump of chesnut-trees. At the end of the court-yard, the lawn of which sloped imperceptibly upwards, appeared the castle between two clusters of trees. Its severe and gloomy frontage presented a curtain crowned with a machicolated, crenulated, covered gallery. This curtain connected two towers unlike in age, materials, height and thickness, which ended in battlements surmounted by a peaked roof, like a cap placed upon a Gothic crown. Here and there, grated windows broke the bareness of the walls. A wide flight of steps, straight and steep, twenty-two in number, without balusters or hand-rail, took the place of the drawbridge across the moat, which was now filled up: it led to the door of the castle, pierced in the middle of the curtain. Above the door one saw the arms of the Lords of Combourg and the apertures through which had formerly issued the shafts and chains of the drawbridge.