Children's stories; Europe -- Juvenile fiction; Travel -- Juvenile fiction
In some towns they have, in the cemetery, a bone-house or reliquary. It
is the custom, after a certain time, to dig up the bones of the dead,
and preserve the skulls in little square boxes like bird-houses, with a
heart-shaped opening, to show the relic within. The names and dates of
the deceased are inscribed outside.
Saint Ives or Yves is a favourite saint, and images of him are in all
churches and over many doors. He was one of the remarkable characters
of the thirteenth century. He studied law in Paris, and devoted his
talents to defending the poor; hence, he was called 'the poor man's
advocate:' and so great is the confidence placed in his justice, that,
even now, when a debtor falsely denies his debt, a peasant will pay
twenty _sous_ for a mass to St. Ives, sure that the Saint will cause the
faithless creditor to die within the year or pay up.
His truthfulness was such that he was called 'St. Yves de verite.' He
was the special patron of lawyers, but he does not seem to be their
model.
The early monks taught the people to work, and their motto was 'The
Cross and the plough, labour and prayer.' They introduced apples, now
the principal fruit of Brittany. Much cider is made and drank; and in
old times they got their wine from France in exchange for wax and
honey, as they were famous bee-keepers. Great fields of buck-wheat still
afford food for the 'yellow-breeched philosophers,' and in many cottage
gardens a row of queerly shaped hives stand in sunny nooks.
These monks were the model farmers of those days, and their abbeys were
fine farms. One had twenty piggeries, of three hundred pigs each, in its
forests. The monks also reared sheep and horses, and bred fish in their
ponds.
Many were also brewers, weavers, carpenters, and so on. Evidently they
lived up to their motto and laboured quite as much as they prayed, and
doubtless were saved by works as well as by faith.
The little Place Du Guesclin, with a stumpy statue of the famous knight
in the middle and chestnut trees all around, was a favourite
resting-place of the ladies--especially when the weekly fair was held
and booths of all sorts were raised at one end. Here Amanda bought a
remarkable jack-knife, which would cut nothing but her fingers: Matilda
speculated in curious kinds of cake; one sort being made into gigantic
jumbles so light that they did excellently for grace-hoops; another sort
being used by these vandals as catch-alls, so deep and tough were they.
Lavinia examined the various fabrics, and got bits of linen as samples,
also queer earthen pots and pans impossible to carry away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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