in shutting his doors upon the mob of miscellaneous customers, he provoked the bitterest hostility amongst the townspeople. The revolution in the hotel was followed by a revolution in the streets. The house was besieged by insurgents; visitors were scared from its doors; and the innkeeper and his family were assailed with threats of vengeance. But he was not a man to be turned from his purpose, and he fought his opponents bravely for two years, sleeping every night with pistols under his pillow, to protect himself against the violence of the crowds that used to gather under his windows, shrieking and yelling with as much fury as if they were seeking for satisfaction upon some great political malefactors. At last he wore them out, and succeeded in obtaining quiet and exclusive monopoly of the travelling and local respectability of the town."
This landlord was in his place when we visited his inn on two occasions. He sat at the head of the table in the old accustomed style when the proprietor actually did receive his guests in person at his well-spread board and do its honours. This man stormed if the dishes were not precisely as he liked them. We certainly did find him as loquacious and as communicative as did Mr. Robert Bell a year or two later; but he was not genial. His wife had a cowed look, peeping timorously at him through her half-closed eyes. How he retained any servants was a wonder to us, but his bark was worse than his bite.
St. Malo is a fortified town on an islet, the streets very narrow, the houses pinching the cathedral so tight that it has to run up high to get out of the smells of stale vegetables and as stale humanity to catch a whiff of sea-breeze. An English colony was at St. Servan on the mainland, comprised of such as sought cheaper living than they could obtain in England; or such as for particular reasons, which they supposed were known only to themselves, but which were freely discussed by the other colonists, deemed it advisable to live away from their own country. They had a chaplain of this latter type. Later, at Paramé, bathing and gambling attracted a good many to this plage.
We drove from St. Malo to Rennes. This city was but then recovered from the fire of 1720, which lasted seven days and consumed the cathedral, eight hundred and fifty houses and all the public buildings. The ancient and massive clock-tower,
