teness, which is very cautious amongst
peasants, demands that only two persons from each family take advantage
of it--one of the heads of the house, and one from the number of their
children.

After the invitations were made, the betrothed couple and their families
took dinner together at the farm.

Little Marie kept her three sheep on the common, and Germain tilled the
soil as though nothing had happened.

About two in the afternoon before the day set for the wedding, the music
came. The music means the players of the bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy,
their instruments decorated with long streaming ribbons, playing an
appropriate march to a measure which would have been rather slow for
feet foreign to the soil, but admirably adapted to the heavy ground and
hilly roads of the country.

Pistol-shots, fired by the young people and the children, announced
the beginning of the wedding ceremonies. Little by little the guests
assembled, and danced on the grass-plot before the house in order to
enter into the spirit of the occasion. When evening was come they began
strange preparations; they divided into two bands, and when night had
settled down they proceeded to the ceremony of the _favors_.

All this passed at the dwelling of the bride, Mother Guillette's
cottage. Mother Guillette took with her her daughter, a dozen pretty
shepherdesses, friends and relatives of her daughter, two or three
respectable housewives, talkative neighbors, quick of wit and strict
guardians of ancient customs. Next she chose a dozen stout fellows,
her relatives and friends; and last of all the parish hemp-dresser, a
garrulous old man, and as good a talker as ever there was.

The part which, in Brittany, is played by the bazvalon, the village
tailor, is taken in our part of the country by the hemp-dresser and the
wool-carder, two professions which are unusually combined in one. He
is present at all ceremonies, sad or gay, for he is very learned and
a fluent talker, and on these occasions he must always figure as
spokesman, in order to fulfil with exactitude certain formalities used
from time immemorial. Traveling occupations, which bring a man into the
midst of other families, without allowing him to shut himself up within
his own, are well fitted to make him talker, wit, storyteller, and
singer.

The hemp-dresser is peculiarly skeptical. He and another village
functionary, of whom we have spoken before, the grave-digger, are always
the daring spiri