the most ancient of all known figures. Sometimes they perform this dizzy evolution with their arms interlaced, when it takes a somewhat more complicated and dazzling aspect. In this shape it changes its name to the bal. Something of the excess with which these pleasures are entered into may be accounted for by the fact, that it is only in their youth and girlhood the Breton females have any chance of relaxation or enjoyment. It is the first joyous bound of the courser into the circus, when he is led round to be familiarized with the glittering scene: all the rest is severe exertion and hard work. The Breton women, the themes of all their poets, the subjects of innumerable elegies, songs, and romances, before marriage, are placed after marriage as low down in the social scale as the women of the Asiatics. In the country they hold an inferior rank; wait upon their husbands at table; and never speak to them but in terms of humility and respect. Amongst the lowest classes of all, they toil in the open fields and surrender up their lives to the most laborious drudgery. And so ends that dream of life, which begins in chansons and dances, and sets in squalid slavery!

But in the midst of their drudgery they are cheered by the voices of the young, in whom the games and romps and innocent sports of their childhood are renewed. Few countries have a greater variety of amusements, and it is not a little suggestive of the identity of the sources of pleasure-perhaps of their limitation— to find amongst these primitive people precisely the same class of plays and diversions which entertained the Greeks and Romans, and which entertain the English and most other nations to the present day. The children trundle hoops, embellished with rattles for bells, the trochus of the ancients; build card houses; play at blindman's buff, odd or even, and head or tail; gallop upon sticks; and draw miniature chariots with miniature horses: every one of which are derived direct from classical examples. Then the grownup people play at bowls, cards, chess, nine-pins, dice, and twenty other games of hazard that have come down to them in the

same way.

A game formerly existed called la Soule, not unlike the English game of foot-ball, but it led to such violent disorders that it has been gradually abolished in most parts of the country. It now lingers chiefly in the environs of Vannes, where the people still retain much of their original barbaric taste for raids and bloodshed. It is occasionally revived, also, in the distant commune of Calvados, in the province of Normandy.* A healthier exercise and

*At a recent sitting of the Société d'Archéologie of Avranches, a paper was read by M. Mangon-Delalande upon the game of Soule, in which he referred to it as an ancient Norman custom. Any of the Breton antiquaries could have set him right upon the point.

more inspiring pastime survives to the Bretons in their great wrestling matches, which are celebrated with all the popular ardour and ceremonial detail of one of the Olympic games.

In their preparations for their manly pastimes, they do not always rely upon natural means, but have recourse, not only to the miraculous waters of certain fountains but to particular herbs, which they gather on the first Saturday of the month, and which they believe have the power of rendering them invincible in the lutte. The employment of a secret advantage, or what they suppose to be one, would imply a spirit of jockeyship wholly inconsistent with the general integrity of the Breton character; but the proceeding carries so heavy a penalty with it that it is very rarely acted upon. The wrestler who fortifies himself with these enchanted herbs risks the perdition of his soul: a sufficient guarantee against the frequent use of so perilous a spell. It is the only instance in which the superstitions of the Bretons recognise the. possibility of entering into a contract with the powers of darkness. Nor does it even appear that any thing approaching to a specific admission of such a contract takes place; although the hazard avowedly annexed to the charm leaves the tacit understanding of some such responsibility clear enough.

The credulity of the Bretons is certainly not chargeable with melodramatic absurdities of this kind. They do not believe that a man can lease out his soul for a consideration. They have no witch-glen bazaars for the sale of inexhaustible riches, or parchment deeds scrawled in blood for reversionary interests in eternity. They are simply the passive recipients of that large class of influences which, from time immemorial, have been associated in the popular mind with the Elements and the Seasons, Night and the Grave, Life and Death. Their creed in this respect, embracing a variety of singular items peculiar to themselves, includes most of the superstitions common to other countries. To the peasant of Lower Brittany, the cries of crows and screech-owls convey a sinister presage. He believes in the fairies who come to warm themselves at his fireside, who dance in the light of the moon, or sit meditating on the sea-shore. He shudders at apparitions and at sounds in the air charged with messages from the world of spirits; and he yields implicit credence to the functions attached to hobgoblins, ware-wolves, and the demons that combat with guardian angels for the souls of men. Many of these superstitions are intimately interwoven with religion itself.

It is a generally received belief that two crows attend upon every house. When the head of a family is dying the ominous birds perch on the roof, and commence their dismal screaming, which never ceases till the body is carried out; whereon the birds

vanish and are never seen again. The approach of death, heralded by numerous signs, is connected in one locality with a remarkable superstition. Between Quimper and Chateaulin, strange-looking men are occasionally encountered on the highways, habited in white linen, with long straggling hair and coal-black beards, armed with heavy sticks, and carrying dingy wallets slung over their shoulders. Their aspect is in the last degree dark and sinister. In the night time they take the least frequented routes. They never sing while they are walking, nor speak to any body they meet, nor put their hands to their slouched hats with that politeness which is so general in Brittany. Sometimes they are accompanied by large fawn-coloured dogs. The custom-house officers tell you that these fellows are smugglers, who go about the country with salt and tobacco; but the peasantry, who know better, assert that they are demons, whose dreadful business it is to conduct doomed souls into the next world. Wherever there is a person at the point of death, they may be seen prowling about the house like hungry wolves. If the guardian angel of the dying man, summoned by repeated prayers, do not arrive in time, the white man pounces on the deathbed at the last gasp, seizes the departing soul, crams it into his wallet, and carries it off to the marshes of St. Michel, into which he flings it, and where it must remain until it is delivered by vows and masses.

The belief, common to all catholic countries, that the souls of men who died without the benefits of absolution, are wandering about in excruciating misery supplicating for intercession, is varied in different localities according to circumstances. There is a desolate plain between Auray and Pluviguer, a mournful stretch of uncultivated ground, formerly the scene of a sanguinary conflict between the houses of Blois and Montfort. Many hundred soldiers fell in the battle, and remains of armour and mouldering bones have frequently been turned up there. The tradition runs that the souls of these poor fellows, still compelled to haunt the dust they once inhabited, rise from the ground at a certain hour every night, and run the whole length of the funereal field. The moaning of the winds over this exposed surface is regarded as the expression of the anguish of the unshrived spirits, entreating for masses. The worst of it is, they are condemned to this hopeless nightly exercise until doomsday, and to gallop on in a straight line, no matter what obstacles they may encounter. Woe to the traveller who falls in with one of these unhappy ghosts. The touch is death.

The remains of Celtic superstitions may be distinctly traced in some of the legendary usages, thinly disguised under Christian forms. Thus in some places they carry the statue of a saint in

The Fairies and their Husbands.

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procession to the charmed fountains, and plunge it into the water, by way of purifying themselves of the sins of the past year: an obvious relic of the pagan custom of washing idols. The arbres à niches, trees converted into arcades by drawing the branches over into an arch, in which crosses or images are set up, are also derived from the Celts, who worshipped all natural objects, and trees amongst the rest, believing them to be animated by supernatural intelligences. Then the stones and monuments of the Druids have particular virtues ascribed to them. Some conceal buried treasures; some, like the forge of Wayland Smith in Berkshire, possess magical powers; and an immense stone, poised on its inverted apex, called by the French the pierre vacillante, which the finger of a child would easily shake, will not move if attempted by the whole strength of a man whose wife has deceived him. At Carnac, if you pass the cemetery at midnight, you find all the tombs open, the church illuminated, and two thousand spectres on their knees listening to Death delivering a sermon from the top of the choir, in the dress of a priest. Some of the peasants will confidently affirm that they have beheld from a distance the light of the numerous wax-tapers, and have even heard the confused voice of the preacher.

6

The fairy lore of Brittany is literally located among these monuments. The Roches aux Fées (for there are many besides the celebrated one near Rennes) must not be approached after nightfall. It is here the fairies hold their court, and dance their elfish hays in the moonlight. The barrows are called the châteaux of of the poulpicans. The poulpicans are no other than the husbands of the fairies, and make a very prominent figure in the mischievous gambols of Fairy-Londe.' The fairies are fair handsome women, conceived in the most perfect French taste, but their husbands are little squat ugly black men, who take the utmost delight in all sorts of whimsical and malicious jokes; playing Will-o'-the-Whisp to the poor herdsmen in the woods, when they are looking after their strayed cattle, and seizing young girls by the neck as they are wending home at night, when the offended damsels, horridly vexed at having such a freedom taken with them, turn round in a furious passion to scold the supposed clown, but get nothing for their pains but the faroff laughter of the frolicsome poulpicans. A thousand legends are related about these humorous sprites. Often in the winter nights, cries of apparent agony are heard outside as the family sit listening to the crackling of the fire in the chimney nook. The children think it is the wind straining the pulleys in the neighbouring pits, or the wings of a windmill creaking on their axis, or the twirling post placed on the great apple-tree to frighten off

the birds: but the old people shake their heads, and declare that these shrieking noises are the cries of the poulpicans calling to each other to run round the cromlechs on the hill side. Those who are wise will never stir out on such occasions, but place a vase full of millet at the foot of their beds. The object of this precaution is to catch the poulpicans in a trap should they venture to come into the house; for they are sure to overturn the vase in their tricksy fashion, and they are then compelled, by a strange necessity of their nature, to pick it all up again, grain by grain, an occupation which will fully occupy them till daylight, when they are obliged to abscond.

The Evil-Eye, familiar to us in Scotch and Irish traditions, is universal in Brittany, where its influence is supposed to extend to the communication of infectious diseases. They give to this malevolent fascination the name of the Evil-Wind, under the impression that the pestilential effluvium, which streams from the eyes of such persons, is carried by the air to the individuals who are struck by the contagion.

In the enumeration of these fanciful terrors, the hobgoblin, a venerable sprite, must not be overlooked. The Breton hobgoblin is a sort of harlequin among the fiends. He takes the shape of different animals, and also answers for the demoniacal pranks of the night-mare. The loup-garou is another formidable monster, whose business consists in all sorts of depredations in the vicinity of towns and villages. The word garou belongs to the dialect of Morbihan, and signifies a cruel or savage wolf. The loup-garou is the lycanthrope of the French, a lineal descendant of the prowling ware-wolf of the Greeks and Romans.

A people who indulge so largely in supernatural luxuries, may fairly be allowed to pamper their imagination with charms and exorcisms; although it must be frankly conceded to the Bretons, that, except where their religion seems to suggest or foster such operations, they do not often resort to them. Every body who knows Brittany, knows that the buckwheat which is cultivated in such vast quantities over the surface, and which gives such a sickly uniformity to the aspect of the country, is regarded by the natives with feelings of enthusiasm. Buckwheat is much the same to a Breton as the leek to a Welshman, or the music of the Ranz des Vaches to a Swiss. It is the key to the whole system of national mnemonics. We remember a young Breton lady, who, after an absence of two or three years, ran out into the fields immediately upon her return to her native province, and, flinging herself down amongst the wheat, burst into a flood of tears at seeing it once more. A stranger can thoroughly comprehend the nature of this feeling, although, stepping for the first time into the