Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/305

Rh Guirec's image has stood looking seaward—on the very spot where the Saint made his landing when he came from Wales—on a little covered altar, raised on sea-lapped boulders, that fairly is an island at the top of every full tide. Before the altar through all those centuries, as today, outgoing fishermen from Pioumanac'h have checked the way of their boats to make their prayer for a full net; and incoming fishermen have paused again before it, when their prayer has been answered, to make their offering of thanks. That the Christian saint has replaced a Pagan deity, to which anciently the fishers made like prayers and gave like thanks, is an inferential certainty; but the fact that Saint Guirec is a substituted divinity, who took over an established business, does not in the least detract from the credit due to him for carrying things on through a whole millennium so well.

Saint Guirec's Pardon, in celebrating which the grateful fishers take the lead, is one of the queerest and one of the prettiest sights to be seen nowadays in all the world. On that great day all the fisher-boats of Ploumanac'h form in line in the inner bay, bright with fresh paint and gay with flags and garlands, and in procession pull out through the channel and so around to and into the little outer bay in which the oratory stands. There they lie, spread out in a wide semicircle before the shrine of the good saint, while a mass is said on his sea-altar: to which the responses are given from the bosom of the sea. And the while there is a great harmony of sweet voices, upheld by sweet-toned instruments, as the multitudes gathered there—in the boats and on the land—join in the singing of Saint Guirec's Chant.

On the land's sea-edge, within a stone's cast of the island altar, stands a chapel dedicated to Saint Guirec: a low little square building, dating from the twelfth century, set on a tiny plateau beneath a hillock capped by huge boulders in which must be lodged very large Pagan souls. In that chapel, when the water-rites are ended, another mass is said—that ends the religious celebration of the Pardon, and so clears the way for the singing and the dancing and the feasting to begin.

This kindly old Saint, who cares so well for the fishers, has another and a more delicate matter in his charge. To him the girls of Pioumanac'h go a-praying for good husbands: and stick pins into his holy image to make him mindful of their prayers.

The fact is well known that saints, and especially elderly saints, are apt to be absent-minded, and that only by jogging their memories sharply can they be kept down to their work. Standing them on their heads is the usual way of overcoming their disposition to let their wits go wool-gathering; but sticking pins into them is a custom that also is well thought of, and that—although less general now than anciently—is followed with good results in many quiet corners of the Chris- tian world. In Ploumanac'h the pin-sticking custom runs back beyond all memory. The various well-informed women whom I questioned about it answered simply that it had been followed "always"—and opened out their hands with a gesture that relegated its beginning to the very morning of time. They added that nowadays there was a touch of lightness in its observance, a pretence that it was all a joke; but they assured me—I pressed this point on all of them, and uniformly got the same answer—that the under feeling wholly was serious.

The young girls go in frolic couples or companies, one of the women told me, and laugh when they make their prayers to the Saint and stick their pins in his image. "But under all, Monsieur," she added, "they do not laugh. He is good to our girls, is our Saint. He sees to it that they make good marriages. And they know well that he cares for them, and they give him respect in their hearts. I was laughing, and my cousin Marie was laughing, when we stuck our pins. But we were not really laughing, you understand, deep down. And Marie truly had a very good husband within a year."

"And you, Madame?"

Madame smiled very pleasantly. "The Saint did not keep me waiting long, Monsieur—and I have no great fault to find with my Pierre."

Of all the dwellers in the parish only the Curé is opposed to the custom of treating the good Saint as a matrimonial pincushion. Quite lately—since the ac-