A Corner of Brittany. 97 
high breakwater in the hospitable protection of which He a few 
small craft. At high tide these vessels swing at anchor, but the re- 
treating sea leaves them stranded high and dry on the shore. 
The old houses which line the main street of Roscoff date back to 
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and are all built in the pecu- 
liar style of those times. The doors are low with oftentimes a small 
lookout or window at one side of the entrance. The object of these 
windows carries one back to the times of the corsaires, when the 
prudent inhabitant was obliged to have some means of observation 
before he opened the door and allowed a visitor to enter his 
home. The windows are placed high upon the roofs and are orna- 
mented with rudely-cut, grimy faces and grotesque heads of dragons. 
The long sloping roofs, sparsely covered with plaster, give the 
appearance of a recent snow storm. The houses are built of granite 
much eroded and with their walls often whitened by lime. With the 
exception of the apothecary and one or two other modern buildings 
none of the shops have visible signs to denote the wares which are 
on sale. Glass is rare in the windows and the cellars open oblique- 
ly to the pavement of the street. On the seaward side the houses are 
separated from the ocean by courts and gardens protected from the 
ravages of the ocean by high walls, which form the fortifications of 
the place. At intervals on the walls there are lookout towers in 
which, no doubt, many a time the old Breton corsaires have watched 
a strange vessel on the channel, or from which the wreckers perhaps 
have enticed a passing ship to its doom. 
These houses are now the homes of the sailor and the fisherman, 
but in times past the smuggler found there a secure refuge from his 
enemies. These mysterious, small, narrow streets, leading down to 
the water's edge, all remind us of the trade of the smuggler and the 
wrecker. These men have long since disappeared from Roscoff, but 
the old houses, the narrow tortuous passage ways still remain and 
recall the history of the romantic times of the past. 
On the western side of the peninsula on which Roscoff stands 
there is a sandy beach out of which rises in the form of a marine 
monster a precipice called Roch-Croum. Seaward from this cliff a 
number of islands much eroded project in fantastic shapes, a scarred 
battlement broken in points by the resistless ocean. In the forms 
of these rocks we can trace many a giant's head, or fancy many a 
monster rising out of the waves, which continually beat at their 
