On one side of the great, rugged, black fire-place crouched two little girls; the younger half asleep, with her head in her sister’s lap.  These were the daughters of the fisherman; and opposite to them sat their eldest brother, Gabriel.  His right arm had been badly wounded in a recent encounter at the national game of the Soule, a sport resembling our English foot-ball; but played on both sides in such savage earnest by the people of Brittany as to end always in bloodshed, often in mutilation, sometimes even in loss of life.  On the same bench with Gabriel sat his betrothed wife—­a girl of eighteen—­clothed in the plain, almost monastic black-and-white costume of her native district.  She was the daughter of a small farmer living at some little distance from the coast.  Between the groups formed on either side of the fire-place, the vacant space was occupied by the foot of a truckle-bed.  In this bed lay a very old man, the father of Francois Sarzeau.  His haggard face was covered with deep wrinkles; his long white hair flowed over the coarse lump of sacking which served him for a pillow, and his light gray eyes wandered incessantly, with a strange expression of terror and suspicion, from person to person, and from object to object, in all parts of the room.  Whenever the wind and sea whistled and roared at their loudest, he muttered to himself and tossed his hands fretfully on his wretched coverlet.  On these occasions his eyes always fixed themselves intently on a little delf image of the Virgin placed in a niche over the fire-place.  Every time they saw him look in this direction Gabriel and the young girls shuddered and crossed themselves; and even the child, who still kept awake, imitated their example.  There was one bond of feeling at least between the old man and his grandchildren, which connected his age and their youth unnaturally and closely together.  This feeling was reverence for the superstitions which had been handed down to them by their ancestors from centuries and centuries back, as far even as the age of the Druids.  The spirit warnings of disaster and death which the old man heard in the wailing of the wind, in the crashing of the waves, in the dreary, monotonous rattling of the casement, the young man and his affianced wife and the little child who cowered by the fireside heard too.  All differences in sex, in temperament, in years, superstition was strong enough to strike down to its own dread level, in the fisherman’s cottage, on that stormy night.

Besides the benches by the fireside and the bed, the only piece of furniture in the room was a coarse wooden table, with a loaf of black bread, a knife, and a pitcher of cider placed on it.  Old nets, coils of rope, tattered sails, hung, about the walls and over the wooden partition which separated the room into two compartments.  Wisps of straw and ears of barley drooped down through the rotten rafters and gaping boards that made the floor of the granary above.