The flower bed that is planted in the form of a wreath all around the house grows vigorously in the sand.

The day-lilies, one surpassing the other in beauty, open their yellow, pink and red blossoms, and the mignonette beds which at noon-time are fully abloom waft on the air an odor that is sweet as the scent of orange blossoms.
"Opposite us a little path hollowed out of the sand descends rapidly to the edge of the sea." My first really intimate acquaintance with the sea-wrack, crabs, sea-nettles, jelly-fish, and the thousand and one other small creatures that inhabit the ocean, dates from this visit to the Long-Beach.
And during this same summer I fell in love for the first time--my beloved was a little village girl.

But here, so that the story may be related more accurately, I will allow my sister, through the medium of the old copy-book, to speak again--I merely copy: "Dozens of the children (fishermen's boys and girls), tanned and brown and with little legs all bare, followed Pierre, or audaciously hurried before him, and from time to time turned and looked at him wonderingly with their beautiful dark eyes.

At that time a little gentleman was a rare enough spectacle in that part of the country to be worth the trouble of running after.
"Every day Pierre, accompanied by this crowd, would descend to the beach by means of the little footpath scooped out of the sand.

There he would run and pick up the shells that, upon that coast, are so exquisitely beautiful.