“I am bound for Quimper,” he returned; “so are you.  Next Sunday I shall preach in the cathedral, and if you are still there your wish may easily be gratified.”

“We are Protestant,” I remarked.  “You will look upon us as a heretic.”

“Indeed, no,” he returned quickly.  “I am not so narrow-minded as some of my cloth.  One is of Paul, another of Cephas.  I would not even try to convert you, though I am aware that my Church demands it.  But to a certain extent man must be a free agent and judge for himself.  I do not hold with my Church in all things.  We are all bound for the same goal, just as two rivers flowing from opposite directions may empty themselves into one sea.  All roads lead to Rome—­it would be sad if only one road led to Heaven.”

Thus the hours passed swiftly and pleasantly.  The country on either side was diversified and interesting.  Occasionally a river, flowing to the sea, reflected the sky and clouds above, giving poetry to the landscape.  Now hills and gently sloping undulations, here rocky and barren, there fringed with trees whose graceful curves and branches were traced against the pale background of sky.  Again there were long stretches of plain, dreary and monotonous, sad and sombre, like the Breton character.

The peasantry, indeed, are much influenced by their climate, by the sad aspect of the long reaches of field and plain that so often meet their gaze, unbroken perhaps by any other object than a cross or calvary erected under religious influence in days gone by.  And these very crosses, beautiful in themselves, have a saddening tendency, reminding them constantly of the fact that here they have “no continuing city.”  These wide reaches, artistically, are full of tone and beauty, but here again they are at fault.  They know nothing of “tone,” of “greys and greens;” they only know that the general influence is melancholy; that the sun shines too seldom in their skies, and that those skies too often weep.  They cannot argue and analyse; cannot tell why the tendency of their nature, individually and collectively, is grave and sombre; reasoning is beyond them, and if they think of it at all, they arrive at the truth by instinct.  For instinct takes the place of reason, and gradually dies out as the higher powers of the intellect are developed.

They stood out here and there in the fields, few and far between, very picturesque objects; something sad and patient in their very attitudes.  But it was not the time for ploughing and seed-sowing, when they are seen to greatest advantage; for what is more picturesque than a peasant following a plough drawn by the patient oxen, who are never, like so many of the men and women of the world, “unequally yoked together.”  Here and there a woman would be kneeling in the fields, her favourite attitude when minding cattle; kneeling and knitting; there they stay from sunrise to sunset, their mind a blank; vegetating; expecting nothing better from life; untroubled by the mysterious problems that disturb and perplex so many of us; in very many ways so much to be envied; escaping the heritage of those more richly endowed:  the mental and spiritual pain and oppression of existence.