Connected with rural and provincial life are some quaint and pretty religious ceremonies. I need not refer to the _Fête-Dieu_, familiar to all travellers in Catholic countries. The sight of this well-known procession will please or repel you according as it appeals to your head or your imagination. But a far more picturesque procession, and one containing an element of poetry not at all discoverable in the _Fête-Dieu_, is the blessing of the fields and orchards between dawn and sunrise. What a novel and peaceful treat I used to find this ceremony in my far-off French schooldays, whereas the Corpus Christi procession was but a scorching misery! To rise in the blue crepuscular light, with the early birds just stirring in their nests and heard behind the unshuttered windows, and emerge from the deep convent porch into the dew-washed country, following and followed by all the town, walking in two long lines, widely apart, behind the priests in their stoles and surplices, and chanting solemn Latin hymns! It was a rich Norman land we wandered along, now by glittering rills, with the smell of violets in the air, by narrow green paths through the newly ploughed earth, while the mounting sun cast joy into our faces, warming the chill spring wind, and provoking the birds to rival our hymns with their clearer and sweeter notes; then through continents of apple bloom, whole lakes above of pink-white blossoms on either side, with rivulets of upper blue seen through the tracery of foamy waves. Who, watching that solemn procession of amiable enthusiasts, chanting hymns to God and beseeching Him with confidence and fervour to bless the earth and all its produce,—wheat, wine, fruit, and flower, the water we drink, and the grass we tread upon,—could smile or carp at the sprinkling of the ground, of trees, of river-bed with holy water? There was something deeply impressive in the hymns sung at that early hour, while the towns still slept and the woods were scarce awake. As a superstition it seemed to carry us back to the great primal superstitions that have run through the earlier religions. It remains ever upon memory as a large and noble and beautiful form of belief, where Pagan and Christian of all time meet in their fear of inclement nature. Religion has ever associated itself with the rural dread of disaster. Priests say masses for sick cattle, and if the cattle do not benefit by this harmless custom, the peasants are thereby greatly comforted; they have the satisfaction of knowing, at any rate, that should the cattle so prayed for die, it was in the design of Providence, against which even the prayer of devout man was inefficacious. If religion never made more injurious concessions than these to ignorance, the wildest freethinker that ever unsheathed a sword against it must be shamed into laughter at his bellicose attitude. Indeed, it is not only the Catholics of France who expect their ministers to stand between them and rural misfortunes