, the old sorceress, often told me, been
touched by some fairy's wand before my birth. I came into the world
before my time, and was so weak for two months that they did not think
I should live. Code informed my mother that she had an infallible way
of ascertaining my fate. She went one morning with one of the little
shifts which I wore to the sacred lake, and returned in high glee,
exclaiming: "He means to live! No sooner had I thrown the little shift
on to the surface than it lifted itself up." In later years she used
often to say to me with much animation of feature: "Ah! if you had
seen how the two arms stretched themselves out." The fairies were
attached to me from my childhood, and I was very fond of them. You
must not laugh at us Celts. We shall never build a Parthenon, for we
have not the marble; but we are skilled in reading the heart and soul;
we have a secret of our own for inserting the probe; we bury our hands
in the entrails of a man, and, like the witches in _Macbeth_, withdraw
them full of the secrets of infinity. The great secret of our art is
that we can make our very failing appear attractive. The Breton race
has in its heart an everlasting source of folly. The "fairy kingdom,"
which is the most beautiful on earth, is its true domain. The Breton
race alone can comply with the strange conditions exacted by the fairy
Gloriande from all who seek to enter her realm; the horn which will
give no sound except when touched by lips that are pure, the magic
cup which is filled only for the faithful lover, are our special
appurtenances.

Religion is the form behind which the Celtic races disguise their love
of the ideal, but it would be a mistake to imagine that religion is
to them a tie or a servitude. No race has a greater independence of
sentiment in religion. It was not until the twelfth century, and owing
to the support which the Normans of France gave to the See of Rome,
that Breton Christianity was unmistakably brought into the current of
Catholicism. It would have taken very little for the Bretons of France
to have become Protestant like their brethren the Welsh in England.
In the seventeenth century French Brittany was completely permeated by
Jesuitical customs and by the modes of piety common to the rest of the
world. Up to that time the religion of the country had had features of
its own, its special characteristic being the worship of saints. Among
the many peculiarities for which Brittany is notewor