Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/302

282 ter later on. My purred welcome, even more than the drummer's gallant drumming, gave me at once the feeling of being cordially at home.

Mademoiselle the hostess of the Hôtel des Rochers, standing in her own doorway, received me with a shower of smiles. She was round and trim and well turned of sixty; with a wealth of oddly rusty

auburn hair—so frankly factitious that, far from suggesting a deceitful nature, her wearing it was a proof that hers was a courageously honest heart. As a visitor come quite out of season—a ten-franc-a-day thunderbolt from a clear sky—she was ready to welcome me warmly. But when she found that I had come to Ploumanac'h expressly to make my compliment to the town's patron and guardian, the blessed Saint Guirec, her good-will flowed out to me in a gushing stream.

An avowal of interest in the regional saint is a short cut everywhere in Brittany to Breton hearts; and is the shorter in inverse ratio with the saint's celebrity. Practically, the blessed Saint Guirec is unknown beyond the borders of his own very small dominions; and even within them only the Cure can make a fair start toward unravelling his tangled history—and I had traversed half the width of France to pay my respects to him, and I knew more about him than the Curé himself. It followed that my reception was as good as though I had brought a letter of introduction from the Pope.

Saint Guirec is one of the many mixed-up Breton saints—of the two-single-gentlemen-rolled-into-one type—whose personality has been confused by setting on a Keltic root a Latin graft. Along in the sixth century, or thereabouts, he came across the English Channel from Wales: a country in which at that time there was overcrowding in his profession; and whence, consequently, many energetic young saints migrated to Brittany in search of elbow-room to set up for themselves. Recognizing the desirability of making a favorable first impression, the migrant Keltic saints struck the miraculous note at the start. Some of them came over through the air. Others walked over dry-shod on the water. A few—a little vaingloriously, perhaps—ferried themselves across the Channel in their own stone coffins, and by that feat in flotation distanced the field.

Thus it fell out that when pioneer saints from Rome arrived in Brittany they found the earlier-come Keltic saints in possession of the territory. The situation resembled that which was developed here in New York in the case of the resident Dutch and the in-pressing English: with modifications due to the absolute lack among either the Dutch or the English of any qualities even remotely suggestive of sanctity. Keltic Christianity was waning and Roman Christianity was waxing; and, as saints markedly are disposed to stand on their dignity, a very determined effort was made by the later arrivals to oust their predecessors. In part that effort was successful. The major Keltic saints could not be budged from their place in Breton hearts; but the minor ones—who had not stone-coffin records too notorious to be tampered with—were deprived of their