CONFIDENCE
form an attractive place of sojourn for persons of an irritable nostril. To go to Paris, however, was hardly more attractive than to remain at Havre, for Bernard had a lively vision of the heated bitumen and the glaring frontages of the French capital. But if a Norman town was close and dull, the Norman country was notoriously fresh and entertaining, and the next morning Bernard got into a calèche with his luggage, and bade its proprietor drive him along the coast. Once he had begun to rumble through this charming landscape, he was in much better humour 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 grainfields 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 best attention. 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 farther. He engaged a room at the inn, dismissed his vehicle, and gave
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