the friend, guide, and philosopher of several authentic counts and countesses and marchionesses and diplomats, a woman who had travelled in Russia, Poland, Germany, and England, and admired all these races; in fact, a charming old lady, a mass of pride and prejudice, yearning to-day for another St. Bartholomew, and yet devoted to several Protestants and to at least one freethinker; who professes an ancien-régime hatred and scorn of the lower classes, and treats her servant, her portress, her frotteur, the woman who sells her milk, and the woman who sells her vegetables as her dearest friends, from sheer largeness of heart and generosity of nature. She is not the first person of whom I can truthfully say, "Her virtues are all her own, her vices belong to her religion."
In Brittany it is the custom to bless houses, and this ceremony is not always accomplished without some bluster; above all, if the spirit of the dead should be attached to it. When a Breton suspects his house to be under ghostly domination, he sends for a powerful fellow in sacerdotal raiment to dislodge the devil. The priest comes, clad in surplice, and, holding his stole in hand, takes off his boots, so that he "shall be a priest to the very ground." We are told that the staircase and the floors are inevitably covered with sand as evidence of the traces of the ill-intentioned dead. The priest must follow
