CHAPTER III. 



"THE TOILERS OF THE SEA." 



The scene of " Les Travailleurs de la Mer" is Guernsey, and 

 the two characters brought most prominently forward are Gilliatt 

 and Clubin. Gilliatt was a man not much liked. He avoided 

 company, neither drank, smoked, chewed, nor snuffed ; and lived 

 in a house which, if not then haunted, was suspected of having 

 formerly been so. None, however, could deny that he was a 

 thorough seaman, a successful fisherman, a skilful pilot, and an 

 expert swimmer; and subsequent events proved him to possess 

 dauntless courage, pertinacious determination, a soft heart, and 

 chivalrous spirit. Clubin was in every moral quality exactly the 

 reverse. He had the reputation of being a man of severe probity, 

 strictly religious, and of unsurpassable integrity; and thus was 

 appointed master of a little steamer named the **' Durande," which 

 traded between Guernsey and St. Malo, and belonged to a 

 Monsieur Lathierry. But although Clubin had gained the good 

 opinion of his neighbours by his cunning and adroitness, he was 

 a consummate hypocrite, and an unscrupulous scoundrel. A 

 former partner of Lathierry, named Rantaine, had robbed their 

 joint cash-box ten years previously of a hundred thousand francs, 

 fifty thousand of which, of course, belonged to Lathierry. Nothing 

 had been seen or heard of him since he absconded, until one day 

 Clubin caught sight of him in St. Malo, watched him enter the 

 shop of a money-changer, and receive three bank-notes of looo/. 

 each (75,000 francs), and, at once surmising that they were the 

 proceeds of the embezzlement, determined to possess them. He 

 prepared his plans carefully, obtained with some difficulty a 



