WILD SPORT IN BRITTANY. 3 



fourteen hundred years ago, when the Romans expelled our 

 Celto-Breton ancestors at the point of the sword, and maintained 

 in its stronghold the head-quarters of their army. 



The inhabitants of the more accessible towns of Brittany 

 imagine Carhaix and its environs to be a region of wolves and 

 savages, wild, fierce, and irreclaimable; but, after a long and 

 agreeable sojourn, passed in daily association with the peasantry, 

 I discovered nothing in them to warrant such a fancy ; but found 

 them, on the other hand, inoffensive, indolent, and scrupulously 

 honest, although in a state of squalor and poverty that beggars 

 description. It is a fact that the wandering Jew, who pervades 

 all climates, seeks no resting-place here -, here, poverty is every- 

 where too apparent, and scares him from the threshold with its 

 threadbare mien ; the waters of the Pactolus are wanting here to 

 tempt his thirsting soul; and he turns aside from granite rocks 

 and sterile wastes, from a soil that blooms with the bracken, the 

 broom, and the furze, from a people that are literally clad in 

 sackcloth and ashes, to wander on in search of other lands more 

 productive and less poverty-stricken, and consequently more con- 

 genial to his tastes and desires than old Armorica. 



It is equally remarkable that gipsies are totally unknown in this 

 district ; the educated Bretons alone, who call them Bohemians, 

 being aware of their Ishmaelitish existence in other countries. Their 

 absence may be fairly attributed to one of two causes : either to the 

 persecution they have long endured from an ordonnance of the 

 States of Orleans, which enjoined that "all impostors and vagabonds, 

 styled Bohemians, should quit the kingdom under pain of the 

 galleys j" or, more probably, I think, to the impossibility of 

 defending their unhoused beasts from the attacks of wolves, 

 which, sometimes in pairs and sometimes in packs, according to 

 the severity of the weather, are a scourge to the whole country. 

 Is it a wonder, then, that between gendarmes by day and wolves 

 by night the gipsy shuns the danger? Our own laws are not 



