A Servant of Satan: Romantic Career of Prado the Assassin — page 186: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

178 A SERVANT OF SATAN. since it was his most cherished wish to meet them all again. That same evening he embarked on. board one of those small steamboats which make the passage between South- ampton and St. Malo, and as he lay tossing on the narrow couch of the deck cabin, many a bitter thought filled his troubied mind. He got but little sleep, and when the vessel _ steamed into the harbor of St. Malo he was standing on deck, looking moodily into the deep, transparent waters, where the jelly-fish were floating many fathoms beneath the surface of the bay, and where a school of porpoises were sporting in the foaming track left by the ship. St. Malo is one of the most picturesque places in France, and one of the most ancient. It is fortified, and its gray, moss-grown walls and battlements, when seen from the en- trance of the harbor, carry one back to old feudal times. Frederick, having passed his trunks through the custom- house, made his way to the best hotel in the place—a grim- - looking stone building, with mullioned windows, rusty iron balconies, and peaked roof, which looked more like one of Dore’s pictures than any modern hostelry. Entering the office of the hotel, he asked for a sitting-room and bed- room, and was soon ushered into the very suite of apart- ments in which the poet Chateaubriand had been born. The ponderous oak furniture of the rooms, coupled with the dark paneling of the walls, rendered them a rather gloomy place of abode. He walked listlessly to the window, and amused himself In watching the crowd of peasants, who, as it was market- day, were assembling upon the esplanade in front of the hotel. The poorer classes have kept here in all its integrity the costume which was worn before the French revolution of 1793 by the peasants in Brittany and the Vendee. ‘The men with their red coats, baggy white breeches, tied with ribbons at the knee over their crimson stockings, low silver- buckled shoes, and three-cornered hats; the women with €co Comic 900 <S