Holy water o’er it pour,
Flowers and tresses flinging.
Bless we now the earthen floor;
May good angels love it!
Bless we now the new-raised door,
And that cell above it!”
He thinks, with the poet,
“Better to roam for ay than rest
Under the impious shadow of a roof unblest.”
In little acts as in great ones it is the same. The knife does not cut the loaf until it has made over it the sign of the cross; the children tell their ages by the number of Easters they have made; the sowing of the grain is preceded by a solemn procession. “The barren field,” says the Breton proverb, “grows fertile under the stole of the priest.” In all his thoughts the religious idea is uppermost. “I was walking in the fields,” says M. de la Villemarquée, “reading a book, when a peasant accosted me. ‘Is it,’ said he, ‘the Lives of the Saints you are reading?’” And the strongest idea a Breton can give you of the truth of any book is that it was written and printed by a priest.