not seem to last above two or three weeks.  The fishermen continued to drag their net, but caught other fishes instead of giancketti.  But while it lasted the plenty of them was prodigious.  All Sestri was eating them, as all Douarnenez ate sardines in the old days.  When the net with its sparkling cargo was dragged up on the sand and the contents were being shovelled into huge baskets to be carried up into the town, the men would take up handfuls of them, fresh, and I suppose still living, from the sea, and plunging their bearded mouths in them, eat them up by hundreds.  The children too, irrepressibly thronging round the net, would pick from its meshes the fishes which adhered to them and eat them, as more inland rising generations eat blackberries.  I did not try the experiment of eating them thus, as one eats oysters, but I can testify that, crisply fried, and eaten with brown bread and butter and lemon juice, they were remarkably good.

Fortified by the excellent example of Sir Francis Doyle, who in his extremely amusing volume of Reminiscences gives as a reason for disregarding the claims of chronology in the composition of it, the chances that he might forget the matter he had In his mind if he did not book it at once, I have ventured for the same reason to do the same thing here.  But I have an older authority for the practice in question, which Sir Francis is hardly likely to have lighted on.  That learned antiquary and portentously voluminous writer, Francesco Cancellieri, who was well known to the Roman world in the latter years of the last, and the earliest years of the present, century, used to compose his innumerable works upon a similar principle.  And when attacked by the critics his cotemporaries, who Italian-like supposed academically correct form to be the most important thing in any literary work, he defended himself on the same ground.  “If I don’t catch it now, I may probably forget it; and is the world to be deprived of the information it is in my power to give it, for the sake of the formal correctness of my work?”

There is another passage in my book on Brittany respecting which it would be interesting to know whether recent travellers can report that the state of things there described no longer exists.  I wrote in 1839—­

“Very near Treguier, on a spot appropriately selected for such a worship—­the barren top of a bleak unsheltered eminence—­stands the chapel of Notre Dame de la Haine! Our Lady of HATRED!  The most fiendish of human passions is supposed to be under the protection of Christ’s religion!  What is this but a fragment of pure and unmixed Paganism, unchanged except in the appellation of its idol, which has remained among these lineal descendants of the Armorican Druids for more than a thousand years after Christianity has become the professed religion of the country!  Altars, professedly Christian, were raised under the protection of the Protean Virgin, to the demon Hatred; and have