a donkey, the farmer and his wife “loading and leading.” Then, too, Darby and Joan often thresh their crop themselves on the bare earth outside the door, winnowing the result by pouring it out of a basin in the wind. As they stand opposite one another, flail in hand, and lay on thick, the effect, a little way off, is that of a “matrimonial difference”—you hear the blows distinctly.
What they do with the grit and dirt the corn picks up, I don’t know: grind their teeth down, I suppose. Of course these poor people employ no labour and lay no capital out on the land. They do their own work and get food enough to carry life on, at a snail’s pace, throughout the monotonous years.
The face of Brittany is seamed and wrinkled with a thousand narrow lanes which waste the soil and bewilder the traveller. The country has been compared to a “rabbit warren” with the turf flayed off, and all the burrows laid bare.
The highways are excellent, and skirted by an electric telegraph. They are as unlike the ordinary roads of the country as the Great Northern is to a cow-path; but will, I suppose, in time be superseded by the rail.
You never see what we understand by a gentleman’s carriage anywhere in these parts. There are vehicles which cost more than the others, and are driven by their owners in good clothes, or coachmen in laced hats; but there is a varnished second-hand look about the best of them, which spoils the effect they are evidently intended to produce.
Inns are tolerably good, and the fare is sufficient. The two meals of the day are a table-d’hôte breakfast at ten, and dinner at six. Great decanters of cider are placed on the board at both, the French generally taking neither coffee nor tea then. Many have a cup at six or seven, and breakfast after a few hours, heavily.
One speciality of the country is its cattle. The horses are mostly grey, and hard as nails. The cows are becoming familiar to us in England, being just now the fashion for gentlemen’s parks. They are very small. There was a cow-market at Dinan while I was there, and I found that very many of the animals were no higher than the bottom of my waistcoat. Women came in from the country dragging full-grown cows no bigger than our calves. There were about 200 horses for sale at the same time,—strong serviceable beasts, with great heads and long tails. A good animal fetched about 30l. I looked in vain among the farmers and drovers who attended the market for men of a superior class. They were apparently all dirty, close-fisted, and profane. Sacr-r-r-r-r-ing away at one another, at themselves, and at nothing, all the day.
The patois of the Bretons is horrible. In some districts they have, I am told, still a peculiar language, preserving their Celtic tongue, and being, intelligible to genuine Welshmen.
Those who visit this country for scenery ought to be fond of apple-trees, for they fill a great part of the land. Some views, such as that from Avranches over the bay of St. Michel, are very striking; most, however, are praised, not because they are good, but because the others are bad. A squinting hillock is a mountain among flats.
The charm of the province is its number of quaint towns and occasional coast scenery. The former are very picturesque and offensive. But if you have been living in the bustle of the nineteenth century, and fussing yourself with schemes of progress or the like, you cannot get a greater change than by putting the clock of your observation back some hundred years or so among the lesser towns of the Bretons. You will return not only refreshed by the bodily recreation, but ready to appreciate still better the state of civilisation which Britons have reached.
“TEMPORA MUTANTUR.”
“First waltz? let me see; with much pleasure!”
She handed her fan to her aunt;
How we whirl’d to the deux-temps’ swift measure,
I fain would describe; but I can’t.
An oarsman would say that we “spurted;”
A sportsman, we “went like a bird;”
I shall merely remark that we flirted
In a manner extremely absurd.
And when all my twirling was over,
And I and my pipe were alone,
My heart, I began to discover,
Had ceased to be wholly my own.
As Paddy would say, “More by token,”
Our hearts must be made of tough clay,
For mine’s been a hundred times broken,
And here it is beating to-day!
And now I sit here in my attic,
Alone, with a cold in my head,
And think, although somewhat rheumatic,
Of dancing in days that are dead.
A waltz, and but one! ’twas but little
To live in my mem’ry so long;
But, at twenty, one’s heart is as brittle
As one’s love of sensation is strong.
I pick’d up a flow’ret which, drooping,
Had fall’n from the wreath it had graced;
At present, just fancy me stooping—
I’m over four feet round the waist!
The programme which held her sweet surname,
I gazed on with tenderest looks;
Just now, I am certain that her name
Would move me far less than my cook’s.
It comes to us all, that sad season,
When a man has his waistcoats made wide,
And his wife ceases strumming the keys on,
And carries her keys by her side;
When we will go to sleep after dinner,
And perhaps at odd times in the day;
When the hair on our head’s getting thinner,
And our beard and our whiskers get grey;
When we can’t hold our horse with a snaffle;
When our waltzing’s no longer our forte;
These sad recollections I’ll baffle
With a bumper of crusted old Port.
