the name Cagot, which those maintaining the opinion of their Saracen
descent held to be Chiens, or Chasseurs des Gots, because the Saracens
chased the Goths out of Spain. Moreover, the Saracens were originally
Mahometans, and as such obliged to bathe seven times a-day: whence the
badge of the duck's foot. A duck was a water-bird: Mahometans bathed in
the water. Proof upon proof!

In Brittany the common idea was, they were of Jewish descent. Their
unpleasant smell was again pressed into service. The Jews, it was well
known, had this physical infirmity, which might be cured either by
bathing in a certain fountain in Egypt--which was a long way from
Brittany--or by anointing themselves with the blood of a Christian child.
Blood gushed out of the body of every Cagot on Good Friday. No wonder,
if they were of Jewish descent. It was the only way of accounting for so
portentous a fact. Again; the Cagots were capital carpenters, which gave
the Bretons every reason to believe that their ancestors were the very
Jews who made the cross. When first the tide of emigration set from
Brittany to America, the oppressed Cagots crowded to the ports, seeking
to go to some new country, where their race might be unknown. Here was
another proof of their descent from Abraham and his nomadic people: and,
the forty years' wandering in the wilderness and the Wandering Jew
himself, were pressed into the service to prove that the Cagots derived
their restlessness and love of change from their ancestors, the Jews. The
Jews, also, practised arts-magic, and the Cagots sold bags of wind to the
Breton sailors, enchanted maidens to love them--maidens who never would
have cared for them, unless they had been previously enchanted--made
hollow rocks and trees give out strange and unearthly noises, and sold
the magical herb called _bon-succes_. It is true enough that, in all the
early acts of the fourteenth century, the same laws apply to Jews as to
Cagots, and the appellations seem used indiscriminately; but their fair