continued to the present day to receive an unholy worship from blinded bigots, who hope to obtain Heaven’s patronage and assistance for thoughts and wishes which they would be ashamed to breathe to man.  Three Aves repeated with devotion at this odious and melancholy shrine are firmly believed to have the power to cause, within the year, the certain death of the person against whom the assistance of Our Lady of Hatred has been invoked.  And it is said that even yet occasionally, in the silence and obscurity of the evening, the figure of some assassin worshipper at this accursed shrine may be seen to glide rapidly from the solitary spot, where he has spoken the unhallowed prayer whose mystic might has doomed to death the enemy he hates.”

I must tell one other story of my Breton recollections, which refers to a time much subsequent to the publication of the book I have been quoting.  It was in 1866 that I revisited Brittany in company with my present wife; and one of the objects of our little tour was the Finisterre land’s end at the extreme point of the horn-like promontory which forms the department so named.  We found some difficulty in reaching the spot, not the least part of which was caused by the necessity of threading our way, when in the immediate neighbourhood of the cliffs, among enormous masses of seaweed stacked in huge heaps and left to undergo the process of decay, which turns it into very valuable manure.  The odour which impregnated the whole surrounding atmosphere from these heaps was decidedly the worst and most asphyxiating I ever experienced.

We stood at last on the utmost Finis terrae and looked over the Atlantic not only from the lighthouse, which, built three hundred feet above the sea level, is often, we were told, drenched by storm-driven spray, but from various points of the tremendous rocks also.  They are tremendous, in truth.  The scene is a much grander one than that at our own “Land’s End,” which I visited a month or two ago.  The cliffs are much higher, the rocks are more varied in their forms—­more cruelly savage-looking, and the cleavages of them are on a larger scale.  The spot was one of the most profound solitude, for we were far from the lighthouse, and the scream of the white gulls as they started from their roosting-places on the face of the rocks, or returned to them from their swirling flights, were the only indication of the presence of any creature having the breath of life.

The rock ledges, among which we were clambering, were in many places fearful spots enough—­places where a stumble or a divagation of the foot but six or eight inches from the narrow path would have precipitated the blunderer to assured and inevitable destruction.  “Here,” said I to my wife, as we stood side by side on one such ledge, “would be the place for a husband, who wanted to get rid of his wife, to accomplish his purpose.  Done in ten seconds!  With absolute certainty!  One push would suffice!  No cry of any more avail than the screams of those gulls!  And no possibility of the deed being witnessed by any mortal eye!”