236 THE RITUAL OF BARROWS AND CIRCLES. 



A large number of the people belong to Burial Societies each 

 of which has a chapel of its own, and all the funeral rites are 

 performed by the officials of the guild. 



Besides this, there is, for other persons, a vast area, and to the 

 walls that encompass it are fixed shelves and depositories for the 

 bones of the deceased, whose primary interment takes place in 

 the ordinary earth of the enclosure. This is marked out into a 

 number of gardens, as it were, in which are planted flowers, It 

 resembles, on a very large scale, the grave-plots in a cloister. 



Last of all, for the unhappy poor, is a smaller cemetery in 

 which are caverns, 366 in number, each covered with a huge 

 stone slab. Every day one of them, in rotation, is opened and 

 closed. Each contains the bodies of those paupers who have 

 died on the day it was opened, thrown in one over the other ; 

 and the bodies that have been removed, and that have rotted 

 there for one year, are cast through an orifice, perhaps four feet 

 square. Its sides are stained and smeared with corruption. 

 This orifice, which is closed by a stone door, leads straight down 

 into an unfathomable gulf, perhaps the galleries of an abandoned 

 tufaceous quarry. 



How great must be the force of habit and heredity when men 

 are driven, in the face of the twentieth century, to continue such 

 arduous and revolting practices. 



Some very ancient customs persist in Brittany. There are 

 cemeteries in which the horizontal stone that covers the grave 

 has a little cup hollowed in it, like those on many a prehistoric 

 megalith, and into this is poured once a year milk or rice. 



Many of the churchyards in Brittany contain well-built 

 ossuaries. That at St. Th6gonnec is so large and handsome that 

 it has been converted into a chapel. After the dead have been 

 interred for some years, relatives, who still care for the deceased, 

 dig up the skeleton and place it in the ossuary, the long 

 bones arranged together with those of ancestors, but the skull 

 enclosed in a special wooden case with an aperture or window, 

 through which its contents can be seen, and with a memorial 

 inscription, such as "Chef de Mile Jne Mar6e, 1867;" "Ci git 



