sparks from them they expelled every evil, a practice which is still followed in Cornwall and other places: the dance itself, for which there is always, to be sure, a sufficient excuse in the animal spirits of the revellers, had reference to the produce of the vine and in some parts of Ireland the people still exhibit an implicit reverence for the old faith, by making their cattle pass through the fire for the purpose of charming them against disorders.

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haps, on the whole, the most striking. Throughout the day, the poor children go about begging contributions for lighting the fires of Monsieur St. Jean; and, to wards evening, one fire is gradually followed by two, three, four; then a thousand gleam out from the hill tops, till the whole country glows under the conflagration. Sometimes the priests light the first fire in the market-place; and sometimes it is lighted by an angel who is made to descend, by a mechanical device, from the The Pardons are the favorite points of top of the church with a flambeau in her meeting for the youth of both sexes. Here hand, setting the pile in a blaze, and flying they freely indulge in their national games, back again. The young people dance with and above all in the dance. The excitebewildering activity round these fires, for ment of these scenes can hardly be underthere is a superstition amongst them that stood by the civilized reader whose taste if they dance round nine fires before mid- is subdued by the refinements of the modnight, they will be married in the ensuing ern ball-room; nor, without having actually year. Seats are placed round the flaming witnessed a Breton festival is it possible to piles for the dead, whose spirits are sup- conceive the frenzy of delight with which posed to come there for the melancholy it is enjoyed by the people. Their principleasure of listening once more to their pal dances are composed of popular channative songs, and contemplating the live-sons, played upon an ancient national inly measures of their youth. Fragments strument, the bombarde, accompanied by of the torches on those occasions are pre- the binion, a species of bag-pipe, which served as spells against thunder and ner. serves to mark the time with rude but emvous diseases, and the crown of flowers phatic precision. The form of the dance which surmounted the principal fire is in may be best described as consisting of a such request as to produce tumultuous succession of gyrations, the dancers whirljealousy for its possession. At Brest, ing themselves round in a circle, with linkwhere the crowd, swelled by sailors, is ed hands, at a rate of perilous rapidity. This considerably more riotous than elsewhere, is called the ronde, and is probably the most there is a wild torch dance which winds ancient of all known figures. Sometimes up the night with savage uproar. There they perform this dizzy evolution with their can be no doubt that this festival is a re- arms interlaced, when it takes a somewhat lique of Druidism, and that the fires had more complicated and dazzling aspect. In their origin in the worship of the sun. this shape it changes its name to the bal. They are, in every respect, identical with Something of the excess with which these the Beal teinidh of the Phoenicians. The pleasures are entered into may be account custom of kindling fires about midnight at ed for by the fact, that it is only in their the moment of the summer solstice, con- youth and girlhood the Breton females sidered by the ancients a season of divina- have any chance of relaxation or enjoytions, was a custom of remote antiquity, ment. It is the first joyous bound of the and seems to have been grafted upon Chris- courser into the circus, when he is led tianity by a common movement of all mod-round to be familiarized with the glittering ern nations. When the year began in June, scene: all the rest is severe exertion and there was a direct significance in this feu hard work. The Breton women, the de joie, which was intended to celebrate the themes of all their poets, the subjects of commencement of vegetation, and to pro- innumerable elegies, songs, and romances, pitiate the fruits of the year by vows and before marriage, are placed after marriage sacrifices: but the usage still continued, as low down in the social scale as the woby the force of habit, after its symbolical men of the Asiatics. In the country they meaning had long ceased. That St. John hold an inferior rank; wait upon their husshould have inherited the fires of the sun bands at table; and never speak to them but is not half so curious as that the Christian in terms of humility and respect. Amongst festival should have retained some of the the lowest classes of all, they toil in the rites which were potent only in the Pagan open fields and surrender up their lives to interpretation. Thus the ancients used to the most laborious drudgery. And so ends carry away the burning flambeaux, in the that dream of life, which begins in chansons belief that as they shook off showers of and dances, and sets in squalid slavery!

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.

But in the midst of their drudgery they | with these enchanted herbs risks the perare cheered by the voices of the young, in dition of his soul; a sufficient guarantee whom the games and romps and innocent against the frequent use of so perilous a sports of their childhood are renewed. Few spell. It is the only instance in which the countries have a greater variety of amuse- superstitions of the Bretons recognize the ments, 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 enter tained 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 grown-up 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 more inspiring pastime survives to the Bretons in their great wrestling matches, which are celebrated with all the popular ardor and ceremonial detail of one of the Olympic games.

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, warewolves, and the demons that combat with guardian angels for the souls of men. Many of these superstitions are intimately interwoven with religion itself.

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 It is a generally received belief that two on the first Saturday of the month, and crows attend upon every house. When which they believe have the power of ren- the head of a family is dying the ominous dering them invincible in the lutte. The birds perch on the roof, and commence their employment of a secret advantage, or what dismal screaming, which never ceases till they suppose to be one, would imply a spi- the body is carried out; whereon the birds rit of jockeyship wholly inconsistent with vanish and are never seen again. The apthe general integrity of the Breton charac-proach of death, heralded by numerous ter; but the proceeding carries so heavy a signs, is connected in one locality with a penalty with it that it is very rarely acted remarkable superstition. Between Quimupon. The wrestler who fortifies himself per and Chateaulin, strange-looking men

are occasionally encountered on the high

*At a recent sitting of the Société d'Archéologie ways, habited in white linen, with long of Avranches, a paper was read by M. Mangor- straggling hair and coal-black beards, armDelalande upon the game of Soule, in which he re-ed with heavy sticks, and carrying dingy ferred to it as an ancient Norman custom. Any wallets slung over their shoulders. Their of the Breton antiquaries could have set him right upon the point. aspect is in the last degree dark and sinis

vious 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 intel

ter. 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-colored dogs. The custom-house officers tell you that these fellows are smugglers, who go ligences. Then the stones and monuments 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 be flings it, and where it must remain until it is delivered by vows and

masses.

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.

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 The fairy lore of Brittany is literally localities according to circumstances.- located among these monuments. The There is a desolate plain between Auray Roches aux Fées (for there are many beand Pluviguer, a mournful stretch of un-sides the celebrated one near Rennes) must cultivated ground, formerly the scene of a not be approached after nightfall. It is sanguinary conflict between the houses of here the fairies hold their court, and dance Blois and Montfort. Many hundred soldiers fell in the battle, and remains of armor and mouldering bones have been frequently 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 procession to the charmed fountains, and plunge it into the water, by way of purifying themselves of the sins of the past year: an ob

their elfish hays in the moonlight. The barrows are called the châteaux 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 far off laughter of the frolick some 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 to a Breton as the leek to a Welshman, or the neighboring pits, or the wings of a the music of the Ranz des Vaches to a windmill creaking on their axis, or the Swiss. It is the key to the whole system twirling post placed on the great apple-tree of national mnemonics. We remember a to frighten off the birds; but the old peo- young Breton lady, who, after an absence ple shake their heads, and declare that of two or thee years, ran out into the fields these shrieking noises are the cries of the immediately upon her return to her native poulpicans calling to each other to run province, and flinging herself down amongst round the cromlechs on the hill side. the wheat, burst into a flood of tears at seeThose who are wise will never stir out on ing it once more. A stranger can thosuch occasions, but place a vase full of roughly comprehend the nature of this millet at the foot of their beds. The ob- feeling, although, stepping for the first ject of this precaution is to catch the poul- time into the wheat-ground, steaming with picans in a trap should they venture to that peculiar odor by which it is distincome into the house; for they are sure to guished, it is quite impossible to compreoverturn the vase in their tricksy fashion, hend how even the most patriotic ardor and they are then compelled, by a strange can overcome the disagreeable olfactory necessity of their nature, to pick it all up sensation it provokes. This wheat, howagain, grain by grain, an occupation which ever, is converted into the main article of will fully occupy them till daylight, when consumption by the peasantry; the most they are obliged to abscond. substantial reason that can be assigned for their inordinate admiration of it; and the black bread thus produced becomes an active minister in a variety of conjurations. Whether the virtue is supposed to reside originally in the wheat, or is only reflected back upon it by the influence attributed to the bread itself, we have no means of determining; but it is certain that on many occasions of difficulty the bread is resorted to, not merely as a sort of sanctified agent, In the enumeration of these fanciful ter- but as a vehicle of divination. rors, the hobgoblin, a venerable sprite, must first-born child is taken to the church to not be overlooked. The Breton hobgoblin be baptized, the mother hangs a piece of is a sort of harlequin among the fiends. black bread round its neck to indicate He takes the shape of different animals, the poverty of her circumstances; seeing and also answers for the demoniacal pranks of the night-mare. The loupgarou 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

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.

Romans.

When a

which, the evil spirits do not consider it worth their while to shower misfortunes on the infant, and so they are cheated of their victim with their eyes open. When a person is drowned, the family assemble in mourning, and throw a piece of black bread, with a wax-light on it, into the water; it is sure to float to the spot where the body lies. When any thing is stolen, they have a certain method of detecting the thief by flinging pieces of black bread, A people who indulge so largely in su- of equal size, into the water, pronouncing pernatural luxuries, may fairly be allowed at each cast the name of a suspected perto pamper their imaginations with charms son; when the real robber is named, the and exorcisms; although it must be frank-piece representing him is sure to sink. It ly 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

might be supposed that the certainty of failure in a multitude of instances, would at last have the inevitable effect of exposing the fallaciousness of the test; but the experience of all human nature proves, that the frustration of such experiments is attended by no other result than that of fixing the delusion still more deeply. Such articles of belief do not depend upon the efficacy of trial, but upon the strength of

faith; and failure, instead of endangering out the night, digging the sands with their their credit, deepens the halo of supersti- naked feet, and stripping off between their tion by which they are invested. A be- fingers the leaves of rosemary flowers cullliever will believe any thing rather than that "his faith is in the wrong ;" and it is so easy to shift the responsibility of disappointment upon the blunders of manipulation, that he always has a convenient excuse at hand which will cover any imaginable dilemma, and even transform the most palpable defeat into a victory.

ed upon the beach. These women, according to the tradition, are natives of the island who, marrying strangers, and dying in their sins, have returned home to their beloved birth-place to beg the prayers of their friends. A great number of their superstitions turn upon this clinging love for the scenes of their youth.

It is a general opinion amongst them that a hurricane can never be appeased until the waves have rejected and flung upon the shore the dead bodies of heretics who perished by shipwreck, and all other unclean bodies. This is a fragment of the old Druidical worship: a dim recollection of that association of ideas held by the Celts as existing between the purity of the waters and the soul of man. The idea was originally derived, probably, from observation of the natural purifying process of the Alpine glaciers, which have a constant tendency to throw up to the sides the heaps of stones and mud they accumulate in their course.

In the districts that lie upon the seashore, many of the popular superstitions are full of poetical beauty, and appeal forcibly to the imagination by the elegiac pathos with which they color the actual circumstances of the people. Here the population consists chiefly of poor fishermen and their families, engaged incessantly in the most precarious of livelihoods, and living upon an iron-bound coast, where their perilous craft is constantly prosecuted at the risk of life itself. The solitude of these scenes is intense; and the tempests which brood over the waters, strewing the shore with wrecks through all seasons of the year, help to increase the gloom that acts so strongly even upon those who are accustomed to contemplate the sea under all its aspects. The frequent loss of husbands and sons, the roar of the waves, and the atmospheric effects which in such situations present so many strange illusions to the eye, are well calculated to work the sea into wreaths of foam, the fishermen upon the terrors of the people, and supply them with melancholy fancies when they sit watching at midnight to catch the voices of their friends through the intervals of the storm. Their superstitions are generally shaped to this end; and phantoms and death-warnings are familiar to them all.

In the long winter nights when the fishermen's wives, whose husbands are out at sea, are scared from their uneasy sleep by the rising of the tempest, they listen breathlessly for certain sounds to which they attach a fatal meaning. If they hear a low and monotonous noise of waters, falling drop by drop at the foot of their bed, and find that it has not been caused by natural means, and that the floor is dry, it is the unerring token of shipwreck. The sea has made them widows! This fearful superstition, we believe, is confined to the isle of Artz, where a still more striking phenomenon is said to take place. Some times in the twilight, they say, large white women may be seen moving slowly from the neighboring islands, or the continent, over the sea, and seating themselves upon its borders. There they remain through

There is a special day set apart for the anniversary of the shipwrecked dead, called the Jour des Morts. On this occasion the winds and waters are brought into active requisition to supply materials for the spectral drama. When the wind ripples

fancy they hear melancholy murmurs stealing over the waves, and behold the souls of the poor creatures who were wrecked rise upon the summits of the billows, and then in ghostly grief, pale and fugitive, melt away like froth. If one of these sad spirits happens to encounter the soul of some wellbeloved friend, the air is filled with cries of despair at the first glance of recognition. Sometimes the fishermen, sitting in their huts at night, hear a strange and mysterious melange of sounds over the bay, now low and sweet, now loud and turbulent, now trembling, groaning, and whistling with the rising of the surge. These mixed clamors of cries and voices indicate the general meeting of the poor ghosts, at which it appears they hold a sort of marine conversazione, and diligently relate their histories to each other.

At the seaside village of St. Gildas, the fishermen who lead evil lives are often disturbed at midnight by three knocks at their door from an invisible hand. They immediately get up, and impelled by some supernatural power, which they cannot resist and dare not question, go down to the