full of the delicate shells which one finds by digging with the
hand in moist burrows.
This was my favorite excursion. However, on days when the
wind was high and the breakers very rough. I abandoned the
shore, and going up the village street I strolled over the uncul
tivated land or rather I sat down with a book on an old bench in
the cemetery where I was sheltered from the wind by the church.
A beautiful place for sadness and reverie. Toward the autumn
sky where the clouds ran, the open belfry raised itself, slim and
pious. The crows which had their nests in it flew croaking back
and forward and the shadows of their great wings glided cease
lessly across the scattered tombs'in the high grass. Between two
of the lialf-ruined buttresses of the church, whose stones had
been roughened and grizzled by the sea-wind, and which were
adorned here and there by a struggling cluster of little yellow
flowers, was a black goat tied to a post, and almost frightful with
his flaming eyes and his Satanic beard, bleating and pulling at his
cord. Above all, in the evening, when, through the skeleton of
an old dead apple tree with twisted branches, one saw below him
at the horizon the sinking sun throw its reddish light on the sea,
this desolate cemetery seemed filled with the soul of a poignant
melancholy.
It was one of these evenings when strolling among the tomb
stones —many of which bore above the name of the mariner the
sinister legend, “ Died at sea ” —I read on a cross, which was yet
new, these words, which astonished and touched me:
Died at sea Oct. 26, 1878, at the age of 19 years,
Died at sea! A young girl! Women almost never embark on
fishing vessels. How had this unhappy one gotten there?
“ Ah, monsieur,” suddenly said a rude voice behind me, “ you
are looking at the grave of poor Nona?”
I turned and recognized an old sailor with a wooden leg, whose
good graces I had acquired by the means of several glasses of
brandy offered him at the inn.
“Yes,” I answered him, “but I understood that you fisher
men did not take women on board. I have even been told that
it was very unlucky.”
" That is true,” replied the good man, “but Nona never went
The Free Lance.
Here rests
NONA BK MAGUET
[December,