more than 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
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.