In that strip of country that lies between France and North Brittany, and is locally known as the pays gallot, the racial characteristics of the people are peculiar. They come of a very anciently mixed stock, and do not closely resemble either of their neighbours; less excitable than the French, they are shallower and more pleasure-loving than the Bretons, and if they follow their church with no less faith, they treat it, sometimes, with more levity. They fulfil the duties that belong to the solemn days of Lent and Easter—though in Saint-Malo, at any rate, carnival has a surprising habit of breaking out on all the earlier Sundays of Lent—but they are very ready to turn to the irresponsibilities of life with a sense of having done all that is required of them. They lose no time in starting on that amazing series of fairs and assemblèes that follow on each other’s heels during the latter half of April and May.

In the district surrounding Saint-Malo, indeed, one of the oldest and best-beloved of these assemblèes is held no later than on Easter Monday, when all the world and his wife, his children and his neighbours, set forth on their yearly pilgrimage to La Boul’neu— which is, being interpreted, the very ancient fair of Bourgneuf, a small village on the road between Dinard and Pleurtuit. It is not, of course, a pilgrimage in any literal sense of the word to-day; but of what it may have been in the past it is impossible to speak with certainty.