What I Remember, Volume 2

of reviews, magazines, and newspapers. I already considered myself a member of the guild of professional writers. I had done much

used by printers or publishers I do not know. But it strikes me that many youngsters, even of the scribbling tribe, may not know tha

a previous hurried scamper in Normandy I had just a glimpse of Brittany, which greatly excited m

amusing book of travels, is other than a great mistake. I forget what proposing author it was, who in answer to a publisher urging the fact that "a dozen writers have told us all about so and so," replied, "But I have not told you what I have seen and thought about it." But if I had been t

y good books of travel, as because the people and their mode of life, the country and its specialties have all been utterly changed by the pleasant, convenient, indispensable, abominable railway, which in its merciless irresistible tramp across the world crushes into a dead level o

t has gained. At all events the progress which can be stated is mainly to be stated in negatives. The Breton, as I first knew him, believed in all sorts of superstitious rubbish. He now believes in nothing at all. He was disposed to honour and respect God, and his priest, and his seigneur perhaps somewhat too indiscriminately. Now he neither honours nor respects any earthly or heavenly thing. Th

my mother. The trip was my main object, and I should have been perfectly contented with terms that paid al

ng "for the good of the house." I had a Gargantuesque appetite, and needed food of some sort in proportion to its demands. I neither took, or cared to take, any wine with my dinner, and never wanted any description of "nightcap." As for accommodation for the night, anything sufficed me that gave me a clean bed and

I was talking about m

-natured smile on his face, and putting into my hands the Times of that morning, with a favourable notice of the book, saying as he did so, "There, so you have waked this morning to find yourself

ay, and as the passage I am about to quote indicates accurately enough the main point of difference between what the

ast-increasing collection of Breton costumes. With this view, he had begun making love to the maid a little, to induce her to do so much

was sitting knitting in the salle à manger, for inspection and approval before she started. Of course, upon such an occasion, the art of the blanchisseu

ion. As the mothers dress, so do their daughters, so did their grandmothers, and so will their grand-daughters." [But I reckoned when writing thus without the railroad and its consequences.] "If a woman of one parish marries, or takes service, or for any other cause resides in another, she

of innovating on the immemorial mode du pays, yet the quality of the materials allows scope for wealth and female coquetry to show themselves. Thus the invariable mode de Broons, with its trifling difference in form, which in the eye of

cities, but a genuine wild flower of nature. No high-born beauty ever more repeatedly or anxiously consulted her wax-lit psyché on every faultless point of hair, face, neck, feet, and figure, before descending to the carri

ce by no means prevented her from springing upon a chair every other minute to obtain fuller view of the tout ensemble of her figure. Again and again the modest kerchief was arranged and rearranged to show a hair's breadth more or a hair's breadth less of

pin or remodel some rebellious fold. When all was at length completed, and the well-pleased parent had received from the servants, called in for the express purpose, the expected tribute of admiration, the little beauty took L'Imitation de la Vierge in her hand, and tripped a

d mother an admirable full-length sketch of her pretty darling. The delighted astonishment of the poor woman, and her accent, as she exclaimed, 'O, si c'était

sardine fishery, which has some interest at the present day. Perhaps the majority of the thousands of English people who nowadays have "sardines" on their breakfast-table every morning are not aware that the contents of a very large number of the little tin boxes which are supposed to contain the delicacy are not sardines at all. They

more familiar to all who have entered any grocers shop throughout the length and breadth of England], "is still more exquisite when eaten fresh on the shores which it frequents. They are caught in immense quantities along the whole of the southern coast of Brittany, and on the western shore of Finisterre as far to the northward as Brest, which, I believe, is the northern limit of the

and children in the place seemed to be feasting upon them all day long. Plates with heaps of them fried and piled up crosswise, like timber in a timber-yard, were to be seen outdoors and indoors, wherever three or four people could be found together.

bait was a specialty of the Thames. Whether an icthyologist would have pronounced the little Sestri fishes to be the same creatures as those which British statesmen consume at Greenwich I cannot say; but we ate them frequently at the hotel under the name of gianchetti, and could find no difference between them and the Greenwich delicacy. The season for them did 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 spark

r 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

ould be interesting to know whether recent travellers can report that

an 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 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 s

re 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, amo

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 pr

d 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 accomplis

me searching of the eye we espied a man engaged in seeking sea-fowls' eggs, who had placed himself in a posi

y brethren, be a