the
anthropologists, to represent the maximum of idiocy and imbecility;
but the decrees of anthropology are only relative: what it treats as
stupidity among the ancient races of men is often neither more nor
less than an extraordinary force of enthusiasm and intuition.

[Footnote 1: A conscientious and painstaking student, M. Luzel, will,
I hope, be the Pausanias of these little local chapels, and will
commit to writing the whole of this magnificent legend, which is upon
the point of being lost.]

[Footnote 2: The ancient form of the word is Ronan, which is still to
be found in the names of places, _Loc Ronan_, the well of St. Ronan
(Wales).]

MY UNCLE PIERRE.

Everything, therefore, predisposed me towards romanticism, not in
form, for I was not long in understanding that this is a mistake, that
though there may be two modes of feeling and thinking there can be
but one form of expressing these feelings and thoughts--but towards
romanticism of the mind and imagination, towards the pure ideal. I
was an offshoot from the old idealist race of the most genuine growth.
There is in the district of Goelo or of Avangour, on the Trieux, a
place called the Ledano, because it is there that the Trieux opens out
and forms a lagoon before running into the sea. Upon the shore of the
Ledano there is a large farm called Keranbelec or Meskanbelec. This
was the head quarters of the Renans, who came there from Cardigan
about the year 480, under the leadership of Fragan. They led there for
thirteen hundred years an obscure existence, storing up sensations and
thoughts the capital of which has devolved upon me I can feel that
I think for them and that they live again in me. Not one of them
attempted to hoard, and the consequence was that they all remained
poor. My absolute inability to be resentful or to appear so is
inherited from them. The only two kinds of occupation which they knew
anything of were to till the land or to steer a boat on the estuaries
and archipelagos of rocks which the Trieux forms at its mouth. A short
time previous to the Revolution, three of them rigged out a bark, and
settled at Lezardrieux. They lived together on the bark, which was for
the best part of her time laid up in a creek of the Ledano, and
they sailed her when the fit took them. They could not be classed
as bourgeois, for they were not jealous of the nobles: they were
well-to-do sailors, independent of every one. My grandfather, one of
the