Search -
Peeps at Brittany; The Bretons, and Breton Literature
Peeps at Brittany The Bretons and Breton Literature Author:Hunt General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1869 Original Publisher: Newby Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select fr... more »om more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II. THE DISTRICT OF TREGTIIER: CORRESPONDING TO THE COTES-DU-NORD. Leaving the sombre rock-bound Cornouaille coast, I crossed over the bleak and barren Black Mountains, and passed into the C6tes-du-Nord. The greyish morning mists were just rolling away before the first sunbeams, the damp leaves sparkled in the slanting light, and a subdued sheen spread gloriously over the dewy sloping fields. Verdant valleys, diapered with white violets and milk- flowers, as the children call the primroses ; fields encircled by hawthorn and privet hedges gay with honeysuckle and eglantine; rows of apple trees, heavily laden with small red and yellow fruit; stray patches of purple heath, sheets of tall golden broom, sheets of lilac potato-flowers and sheets of white buckwheat-bloom billowing in the light wind that shook out its sweet scent; monasteries, feudal castles, pagan temples, glorious ruins, overcrept with ivy, grey with lichen, and crowned with wallflowers; the kine lowing deeply, the birds warbling their morning hymn, and the insects' drowsy hum blending all the greater sounds into a glorious anthem of praise -- this was the C6tes-du-Nord. I visited old Kertaouarn chateau, and I was shown, in the damp dungeon, the huge beam, garnished with the iron rings, to which the lord of the castle rivetted his prisoners; at the iron door of the secret subterranean passages I listened to the wind moaning along the hollow vaults, and my guide told me that the noise I heard proceeded from the souls of coiners who came back at nightfall to ply their trade in the underground caverns. I sl...« less