"I am a master carpenter, sir."
"Thy name, I tell thee," returned the saint.
"Sir, I am a mason, locksmith, able to work at any trade."
"Thy name? For the third time, I command thee in the name of the living God, to tell thy name."
"Hu-Kan! Hu-Kan! Hu-Kan!" cried the demon; and he threw himself, head foremost, from a rock into the sea.
Thus did the Druid superstitions vanish before Hervé, having for a moment resisted him, and sought to deceive him under different disguises.
This Hu-Kan, that is to say, Hu the genius, is no other than the god Hu-Kadarn of the Cambrian traditions. The devil who incites to idleness and debauchery is the Celtic divinity corresponding to the Liber or Bacchus of the Romans. There is in these frogs who chanted their vespers a recollection of Armorican paganism. "The saint silenced them as suddenly as if he had cut their throat" says a hagiographer, adding, "he left voice but to one, who ever since has continued to croak."
Now, by a sort of prodigy of tradition, a popular song, entitled the "Vespers of the Frogs," has come to us; it is the work of the pagan poets of Armorica, represented in common recitatives under the grotesque figure of these beastly croakers. It offers a summary of the Druid doctrines of the fourth century; and it seemed so necessary to the first Christian missionaries to destroy it, that they made a Latin and Christian counterpart, as if they would raise the cross in the face of the heathen pillars. One of these missionaries, Saint Gildas, was so opposed to the pagan music of his time that he qualified its croaking with the sweet and gentle music of the children of Christ; and his disciple Taliésin, the great poet baptized in the sixth century, hushed at a banquet, as Saint Hervé had done, the infamous descendants of the priests of the god Bel, who wished to put him to defiance.
The sound of Christian music was to be heard from all the vaults of the church, for the construction of which Saint Hervé had made so many journeys. Twelve columns of polished wood were erected to hold the low and arched framework; three large stones formed the altar; the spring with which he had refreshed his disciples furnished the water necessary to the sacrifice; the wheat sown by them, the bread for consecration; and the wines of some richer monastery, more exposed to the sun, the eucharistic wine; for it was an ancient and touching custom that those who had vineyards gave wine to those who had not, and in exchange, the owners of bees furnished wax to those who lacked it. Hervé, according to his biographers, himself superintended the workmen, or rather incited the laborers by his words, and sustained them by his songs. Like another poet of antiquity, he built, with his songs, not a city for men, but a house for God.