Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/298

278 sabots and a basket in which no doubt was her best cap. I decided—she had a gayly grandmotherly look about her—that she was going to the christening of her first grandchild. As she passed me she was as smiling as an Easter-morning sun.

At the end of an hour or so we began the ascent of a very long hill: up which the road went wearily to a church-crowned crest that cut sharp against the seaward sky. A dozen times the old horse stopped, wagging his old head slowly from side to side with an air of gloomy discouragement. The brave beast's negotiation of the ascent was so strikingly at odds with the bounding disposition ascribed to him that his melancholy humor communicated itself to his driver—in the droop of whose shoulders was such utter dejection that in sheer pity for him I asked questions about the church on the hilltop in order to make talk. My well-meant diversion sensibly relieved the strain of a tense situation. Ordinarily, at least when sober, the driver was a man of taciturn habit; but he clutched at the straw that I threw him and answered my questions volubly—his shoulders the while rising to an angle of temperate cheerfulness—with a perceptible note of gratitude in his tones.

It was the church of Notre Dame de la Clarté, of Our Lady of Light, he said; a very famous church; a very beautiful church, though old and broken. Pilgrims came to it from all the world, especially those who were afflicted with maladies of the eyes. Upon such Our Lady of Light, when in a good mood, worked instantly miraculous cures. As to the Pardon celebrated yearly in her honor, it was magnificent, superb! And he ran on and on about it all until the old horse fairly had stumbled his way to the top of the hill.

Set close to the church, almost touching elbows with it—that thirsty earnest worshippers may refresh themselves without much loss of time from their devotions—is a little drink-shop appropriately named "A la descents des pélerins." In front of it the horse stopped short. The driver, with an exquisite delicacy, looked quite in the opposite direction and said not a word. After all, I reflected, a traveller should respect the customs of the countries through which he passes—and I bade my man regard himself as a pilgrim and descend. For the remaining mile and a half of our journey—it was all downhill, and the horse ambled onward at a spirited crawl—we were warm friends.

As we went down from the hilltop whereon Our Lady of Light (when in a good mood) works miracles, the valley in which Ploumanac'h lies was open before me; and beyond it, on the horizon seaward, rising purple-gray above the steel-blue of the water, were the Seven Isles—for which is set up the counter-claim, against the claim of Glastonbury, that they in truth are Avalon. Over all the valley, most thickly along its sea-edge, huge strange-shaped boulders of red granite are scattered singly or are heaped up in wonderfully balanced mounds. The mere geologist will tell you that these rounded rocks have been dropped by a glacier; that the valley is the site of a terminal moraine. Any well-uneducated Breton, of course, knows that this explanation is all nonsense. My driver, being cheered by his pilgrim draught, gave me the more satisfying information that in every one of these scattered boulders is imprisoned a Pagan soul; that thus are held fast until the Day of Judgment the Bretons who rejected the blessed teachings of Christianity—and who paid for their stiff-necked sinning by being cast into stone.

Once a year the enchantment is lifted. Then the accursed ones resume their human forms and go down to the sea to drink; to drink long and deeply, that they may lay in a supply of deliciously cold salt water that will ease them through their coming twelvemonth of torment in infernal fires. On the night of that great drinking it is well for all good Christians to bide at home behind barred doors. At cock-crow the accursed ones come back from their sea-cooling to the places where they belong—changing from men and women into rocks again as they surge onward, and surely crushing any spying mortal in their way. Only one escape is recorded from the charge of that fearsome company: that of a poor good man who in charity had carved on one of the enchanted rocks the blessed cross. In gratitude for that loving act, the cross-marked boulder—a monstrous misshapen