in-spouts dry up, they
repair to the trees again. So that during the storm two frail creatures
often enter the blessed house of God together; man to pray and allay his
fears, and the bird to wait until the rain stops and to warm the naked
bodies of its frightened young.

A peculiar charm pervades these churches. It is not their poverty that
moves us, because even when they are empty, they appear to be inhabited.
Is it not, then, their modesty that appeals to us? For, with their
unpretentious steeples, and their low roofs hiding under the trees, they
seem to shrink and humiliate themselves in the sight of God. They have
not been upreared through a spirit of pride, nor through the pious fancy
of some mighty man on his death-bed. On the contrary, we feel that it is
the simple impression of a need, the ingenuous cry of an appetite, and,
like the shepherd's bed of dried leaves, it is the retreat the soul has
built for itself where it comes to rest when it is tired. These village
churches represent better than their city sisters the distinctive
features of the places where they are built, and they seem to
participate more directly in the life of the people who, from father to
son, come to kneel at the same place and on the same stone slab. Every
day, every Sunday, when they enter and when they leave, do they not see
the graves of their parents, are these not near them while they pray,
and does it not seem to them as if the church was only a larger family
circle from which the loved ones have not altogether departed? These
places of worship thus have a harmonious sense, and the life of these
people is influenced by it from the baptismal font to the grave. It is
not the same with us, because we have relegated eternity to the
outskirts of the city, have banished our dead to the faubourgs and laid
them to rest in the carpenter's quarter, near the soda factories and
night-soil magazines.

About three o'clock in the afternoon, we arrived at the chapel of
Kerfeunteun, near the entrance to Quimper. At the upper end of the
chapel is a fine glass window of the sixteenth century, representing the
genealogical tree of the Holy Trinity. Jacob forms the trunk, and the
top is figured by the Cross surmounted by the Eternal Father with a
tiara on His head. On each side, the square steeple represents a
quadrilateral pierced by a long straight window. This steeple does not
rest squarely on the roof, but instead, by means of a slender basis, th