on the grave-digger, and cursed him in his limbs and his faculties. And so, not long after, Michael was found one morning in his bed, quite motionless, with his back broken, and his eyes wild, and his reason gone. The dead of Kerzonn had come down the graveyard steps, to accomplish Nann's malediction."

V.

When, after finishing my frugal meal I returned to the kitchen, I found the room nearly empty, peasants and peasant-women having dispersed and gone their ways in the night through the quagmires or over the steep mountain paths. There remained only about a dozen persons, heads of families, some of them shepherds and some field-laborers, but all more or less nearly related either to the inn-keeper, or to his wife. We have all heard of the tortuous ramifications and multiplications of Bréton relationship. Seated on either side of a transverse table, with Ronan enthroned at one end, while Gäida carved at the other, they ate and drank in silence. Rarely was a word exchanged between the mouthfuls; their very gestures, except for the movement of the jaws, were grave and measured. In the centre of the table stood a jar of cider, into which they all plunged their pint-pots simultaneously, each guest saying, as he did so, "Here's a health to the living! To which all responded in chorus. "And may God pardon the souls of the dead!"

This family love-feast had, for me, a solemn and almost liturgical character. Presently I was myself invited by Ronan to a seat on his right, at the end of one of the benches. "You belong in the Le Braz row," he said; "opposite us is the row of the Tromeur, from one of the branches of whose line my wife comes. Did you ever happen to cast a thought upon the ancestor who was the first to bear our name? For my part, in my solitary jaunts with my old nag, just to relieve the monotony of the way, I have sometimes made believe that I was holding a respectful

conversation with him, through the thick fog of the intervening years. He must have been a stout fellow! The very name which he has bequeathed us, shows that. I wonder what his calling was. Was he seaman or landsman, rich or poor, learned or ignorant? God only knows! But he was an honest man and he begat honest folk. Eh, cousin?" I could only bow in assent. "Here's to the health of the Le Braz,"1 concluded the rag-man. "And to the health of the Tromeur also," returned Gäida.

An old shepherd, with a long, white beard and a very patriarchal aspect now rose and said: "Peace be to men on earth; and peace to the souls of the dead!"

of

Pipes were lighted and a bottle brandy began to circulate. Outside, according to the Bréton expression, the wind was getting up with the moon. The voice of the gale, at first feeble and hesitating, swelled and strengthened, until it filled all space with a formidable roar. The guests presently fell to discoursing among themselves upon the dead of the past year. They enumerated the merits and virtues of each one; the striking events of his life; the circumstances of his departure. It was like a funeral litany improvised, verse by verse, with a regular refrain of "God pardon him!"

When Gäida flung a handful of chips upon the sinking fire, somebody said, "That's right! Warm us with them until we sleep upon them!"

"I'll bet," said the rag-man, turning toward me, "that you didn't understand that!"

I had to admit as much.

"Well," he said, "when the joiner has knocked up a coffin, he is always very careful to lay the chips he has made along the bottom of it, for a kind of litter. It's hard, of course, but softer for the corpse than the bare boards would be. You'd never catch a workman in this country keeping one of those chips in his shop!"

"No, indeed," observed another. "He'd be afraid the dead would come 1 Braz in Bréton means strong.

back for it. The thing has happened." The flame upon the hearth now soared up high and clear, throwing into striking relief the sharply cut profile of old Nann, who had sat on all this while, in her oaken armchair, her bust protruding, her bony hands laid between her knees, indifferent to all that went on about her. Her little pipe still hung from her lips with the bowl upside down; her thoughts were far away; her sombre visage wore an agonized and mysterious expression, at once awestricken and awe-inspiring. She had taken no part whatever in the talk of the guests. "I don't belong to the clan," was her curt reply, when I had taken the armchair opposite her and made some respectful allusion to her silence. Stooping to relight her pipe, she picked up a coal from the ashes and blew it into life in the hollow of her hand. "Aren't you afraid of burning yourself?" I asked.

"Not at all. Fire doesn't catch on ice, and my poor miserable body is nothing but an icicle now."

"You have reached a great age, grandmother. Those eyes of yours must have seen many things."

"They have seen what life has to show. They have seen folk die, the old and the young, the glad and the sad. They are just waiting to close in the long sleep of the great night without stars. The sooner, the better! I am seventy-six years old. My people are all gone. My days are fulfilled. I am just an old, tired traveller crouching by the wayside, waiting for the Ankou's cart. It will be a good moment for me when I hear the creaking of his ill-greased wheels."

She spoke in short, clear phrases; distinct from one another as though severed with a bill-hook. Her eyes glittered like a wild-cat's, as she added, sententiously,

"This world is a desert solitude for me, but down there it is very populous. There are many more dead folk under the earth, than living upon the

face of it."

Ronan now joined us and invited the rest of the company to do the same.

"Come and warm yourselves a bit, boys! There's no hurry!"

"There are four places," said the old shepherd with the snowy head, as he came forward, "where a Bréton likes to linger; under a hay-stack with his girl; in the church before his God; in the inn over his pint-pot, and in the chimney-corner with his pipe." A ring was then formed and the talk became general.

Strange, indelible vigil! I was again reminded in a far-off, mysterious way of the "black vespers" which I had just attended in the damp and murky sanctuary. There was the same deep composure. A singular gravity sat upon every countenance. Each man, as he spoke in his turn, as he told his anecdote, or, as I might say, chanted his anthem, appeared to feel that he was discharging a sacred rite. It was, to all intents and purposes, a funeral nocturne, and positively there was a touch of grandeur in the scene. For chapel, a pothouse; a miserable, melancholy little mountain inn, with ditches hanging from the beams, and walls adorned by earthenware pint-pots, garlanded with gaudy flowers. For altar, the earliest altar of our race, the hearth stone, with its soul of wingéd, whispering flame. For ministrants, a dozen old men, representing the "ancients" of the tribe, shy, simple souls under rough exteriors, the sons of a race deeply pervaded by the primeval awe,-"oppressa gravi sub religione"-Such were the Aryan vespers of the remotest times in the huts of the first shepherds.

Eleven o'clock struck on the old timepiece the swinging of whose pendulum could be seen through a crack which extended the entire length of the wooden case. At the same moment there arose out of the deep stillness of the street, a click of sabots, and the tinkling of a bell. All the company started and made the sign of the cross. "It is the man who announces the dead," said Ronan to me, and proceeded to explain that it was one man's duty on the evening of Novem

ber 1st to make the round of the hamlet, and give notice by ringing his bell of the approach of midnight, the hour of the dead.

"Come, come," said one of the peasants. "We are warm enough. It is our ancestors' turn now, you know the adage, 'Death is cold, and the dead are chilly.'"

And old Nann added, as she gathered her skirts about her, "May the fire of the hearth be sweet to them;" while the rest responded "Amen" as to a prayer.

The "watchers" now took leave. I went a few steps outside with them, and looked after them, as they disappeared into the night. The wind was blowing in great gusts, with sudden calms between. A dim, dissolving moon, vague as those Medusa which we sometimes see floating in the transparent places of the sea, bathed the motionless shapes of the mountains with a pale radiance, a sort of sinister polar glow. The fields and the wide waste of country wore a bluish tint, like that of sleeping lakes.

All down the village street, doors were shutting, locks creaking, and the tiny windows under the projecting eaves were darkened, one by on 2. "Ho there!" cried Ronan. "Come in!" we have but a few minutes left. Nann and my wife have the table all set for the Souls."

A cloth of fine linen, yellow as saf fron with a long hanging fringe, had been spread over the kitchen table, and all manner of eatables set forth: a slice of ham, buckwheat cakes, and an enormous jug of foamy cream. "The dead," said the rag-man, "dote on milk. It's purifying, you know!"

There were actually all the accompaniments of a feast of the Parentalia. The spectacle was a strange one. "Will the dead come?" I inquired.

"How can you ask?" demanded Gäida, with much animation. "Of course they will come! They are arriving this very minute! They will sit down here where we are sitting, and they will talk about us just as we have been talking about them. And they won't

go till day-break after having peered into every nook and corner with those eyes of theirs which nothing escapes, and they will be friendly or angry, according as they like what they see, or no."

"Has any one ever seen them?" "I should not suppose any one ever dared spy upon them."

"Oh yes, they have," interrupted old Nanna.

"Gab Prunenec, he was determined to get sight of them. So he peeped over the bed-clothes. But he paid for it. All the members of his family who had ever died, with his own father at the head of them, came clawing at his eyes, and all the rest of his life he wept tears of blood. If you take my advice, man-of-the-town, you'll sleep with your face to the wall this night," and a shiver ran through her, as she spoke.

"Hold" she said, a moment later, turning very pale. "I've had a sign! A Soul just brushed by me. Goodnight!"

She then mounted the steps into the loft, and disappeared through the black hole of the trap-door. Gäida covered the fire with blocks of peat, so that it might last till dawn and Ronan conducted me back to the "gentleman's room" where I was to sleep in the monumental bed of our ancestors. "Feel!" he said. "It is a good mattress. God grant your sleep may be the same. I'll leave the light burn· ing, but I should recommend you to put it out as soon as you get in bed." And just before closing the door behind him he bethought himself to say,

"Oh, I forgot! If you hear singing outside the house don't be alarmed."

"No, no, I understand." I had heard the curious tradition of the "Deathsingers," who go from door to door, on the evening of All-Saints wailing for the departed.

VI.

Exactly on the stroke of midnight, they went by. In an interval of stillness between two great gusts of wind, their voices rose in a forlorn lament;

the quavering accents of old men, mingling with the tones, crystalline or nasal, as might be of women and youths. The old men droned,

You lie abed, and take your ease!
The poor Souls do so, never more!
You spread your limbs, and are at peace;
The Souls move on from door to door.

Five boards, and one white sheet they
have,

A wisp of straw beneath the head,
Five foot of earth to fill the grave

These are the riches of the dead!

They went on to speak in the name of the Souls, identifying themselves with them. They told of the dread solitude, the long anguish, the manifold tortures of the place of expiation. They reproached the living with their inconstancy, and showed them, against the early day when they too must die, the spectre of universal ingratitude and everlasting regret.

The women and young men knocked first upon the window-panes and then sang:

Out. bare-foot, on the naked ground,
All who live and are sane and sound!
Jesus calls you to wake and pray
For the Souls that have passed away!

I had never in my life listened to so despairing a lament. The accent of the old men in particular fairly froze the heart with anguish. It came like a shriek of terror, a heart-rending appeal out of the very abyss of mortality.

I must confess that I experienced a sense of relief, when the funeral musicians finally withdrew, and the wind got up and swept away into space the echo of their strain.

But for some time after this I could hear the restless movements of Nanna Coadélez in the loft above. She seemed to be kneeling upon her pallet and intoning the De Profundis, while Ronan and Gäida gave the responses from their folding-bed in the kitchen. Finally there was an immense silence broken only by the ticking of the clock.

From The National Review. HAMPTON COURT IN BY-GONE YEARS. For some whose familiar knowledge of it dates back from a far-past childhood, the very sound of the name of Hampton Court bears a sense of oldworld quiet. The noise of fountains falling in rippling rhythm, or the echo of the sentry's measured tread upon the flags, returns-and there is the smell of limes in blossom, and a feeling of old days gone by, and of all that made up for us the unforgotten past. The present writer's grandmother,1 who died at the age of ninety-two, inhabited apartments at the very top of the palace and with her and her life there, the whole place is to me associated. Down her long stone stair of nigh a hundred steps she went, and up she climbed again, once a day at least, till a short time before her death in 1852. I knew her for some twenty years, and to me she was always very old. People said she was a pretty old lady, with her round dimpled face, and the arch look in her grey eyes. Youth, however, sees not the beauty of age, and vividly, as yesterday, I can still recall the bewildering disappointment when she gave me one birthday, her gift of a lock of snow-white hair in a gold locket. The baby heart had coveted instead an auburn curl from the front that adorned her grandmother's brow! It was then that I heard with childish wonder the story of how her hair had turned grey in a single night, after receiving the letter which contained the news of her husband's death. He had sailed to the West Indies to take up his appointment as governor of Tobago, and died of the

1 Lady Albina Cumberland, daughter of George, third Earl of Buckinghamshire.

2 The eldest son of Richard Cumberland, the dramatist