Once he had begun to rumble through this charming
landscape, he was in much better humor with his situation; the air was
freshened by a breeze from the sea; the blooming country, without walls
or fences, lay open to the traveller's eye; the grain-fields and copses
were shimmering in the summer wind; the pink-faced cottages peeped
through the ripening orchard-boughs, and the gray towers of the old
churches were silvered by the morning-light of France.
At the end of some three hours, Bernard arrived at a little
watering-place which lay close upon the shore, in the embrace of a
pair of white-armed cliffs. It had a quaint and primitive aspect and a
natural picturesqueness which commended it to Bernard's taste. There was
evidently a great deal of nature about it, and at this moment, nature,
embodied in the clear, gay sunshine, in the blue and quiet sea, in the
daisied grass of the high-shouldered downs, had an air of inviting the
intelligent observer to postpone his difficulties. Blanquais-les-Galets,
as Bernard learned the name of this unfashionable resort to be, was
twenty miles from a railway, and the place wore an expression of
unaffected rusticity. Bernard stopped at an inn for his noonday
breakfast, and then, with his appreciation quickened by the homely
felicity of this repast, determined to go no further.
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