bodice, cut low and square to admit an embroidered white chemisette and broad, finely quilled ruff. As for their cap, in all Brittany, where each tiny parish has its own, none is so captivating as the coiffe of Pont-Aven, encircled by its ribbon of pink or blue showing through a transparent white wing-like bow edged with handmade lace. The millers were dressed to match, their short coat pointed at the waist behind and trimmed, like the trousers, with velvet; their waistcoat, sometimes gay with yellow Breton embroidery, always bore two rows, well apart, of large gilt buttons; and over the broad brim of their felt hat hung the long ends of a velvet band.

The first painter to behold the unbelievable picturesqueness of such people in such a setting could hardly have hidden his good fortune. But one wonders whether he didn't try, and whether it was not, finally, some canvas of his that betrayed to the artists who gathered later at the inn in the market-place the beauty of the rare old chapel of Trémalo on the hill or the charm of a little maiden of Pont-Aven in a dress exactly like her mother's. And one is never convinced that he did not try; for the two friends of Corot who came in 1860 to Pont-Aven appear for two years to have kept the field quite to themselves. Then they were joined by Robert Wylie, of our American school, whose pictures painted there during the rest of his life drew to Pont-Aven a veritable invasion of artists from every corner of painting Europe and America. Pelouse and Dagnan-Bouveret came. Bastien-Lepage and Renoir; Messrs. John and Anderson Haig, the etchers; Mortimer Menpes, Greiffenhagen; Hovenden, Alexander Harrison, Melchers, Harison, and Maynard among the Americans; and of the modern Dutch, Belgian, and Swedish schools, such masters as Mesdag, Israels, Hubert Vos, van Beers, and Thalow have paid, each in his day, their tribute to the beauty of Pont-Aven.

Indeed, so many of the craft have found their way into this lovely Breton valley, with its quaint folk among the'r mill-wheels and their poplars, that the walls of the dining-room at the inn, now expanded into a spacious hostelry, are nearly covered by panels, set one against

wrote Botrel, the poet of the Bretons; and it was, in its way, a little like Mr. Howells's saying once in his essay on American literary centers: "When I think of Mark Twain, it seems to me that our greatest literary center is just now at Riverdale-on-the-Hudson." It is "Julia" who cares for the village, who prepares the wedding feast, who buries the dead. It is she who has made Pont-Aven the most comfortable spot in Brittany for the traveler.

One November noon, when we entered the delightful old L-shaped dining-room, with its paintings and rare faïence, and carved chests for bread or confiture, and its chimneypiece built from the altar of a demolished chapel, we noticed unwonted glasses at each place at the long table. Some one had barely time to whisper that the Touring Club de France had awarded its golden medal to Villa Julia as the best hotel in Brittany, when Mademoiselle Julia herself appeared, carrying a dusty bottle from which she filled the glasses with white Burgundy. She went about silently, then stood for a moment silhouetted against the great black chimneypiece, and, with tears on her cheeks and in her voice, said simply, "Mesdames et messieurs, I pray that I may be permitted to live twenty years longer so as to deserve this honor." By a happy chance, Monsieur Botrel was there, his striking Breton dress adding to the picture, to spring to his feet with a graceful little speech to "notre bonne et chère Julia." And the rest of us, "anciens" or not, cried "Vive Julia !" with a momentary share in the triumph. For the medal and diplôme to be solemnly presented in the Grande Salle of the Sorbonne, in Paris, was indeed a tri umph, of a sort possible only in that dear, delightful country of France!

Tourists have followed fast upon the heels of the painters. Gray-balconied houses have spread up the hill, about the church. And half a dozen villas, white or pink, now look down upon the boats along

the quay. But Pont-Aven has not lost the charm that gave it the name of "the Perfect Village" in the days when Miss Howard's Gwen danced the gavotte in the market-place. It is precisely when there are most tourists in Pont-Aven that one loves it least; but that is because strangers are unbecoming to the village, not because the villagers have become selfconscious.

If the miracle of Breton faithfulness to tradition is due to any cause other than those things in the heart of the Celt that in four different countries have kept him, after centuries of oppression or subjugation, forever a Celt, it is to the work and example of one man, Théodore Botrel. All France, and more than France, now knows Botrel and sings "La Paimpolaise." But it is not because the Académie has crowned his "Chansons de Chez Nous" that the bard still sings

"J'aime, je chante, et je crois."

It is because his chansons help to keep the Bretons loving their country and their

traditions, singing their gorse-flower and their apple trees, and believing the message brought them long ago by Irish saints. And so, I think, Théodore Botrel may even be called the Gaelic League of Brittany!

Whoever doubts that the Bretons of Finistère go on making pictures of themselves from one year's end to the other has only to go to Pont-Aven when a few painters or other people of a certain sympathetic unobtrusiveness are the only foreigners in the place. A background of apple blossoms or of poplars turned pale gold is even more becoming than the greens of August to these folk who market and wed, worship and bury, in one month as picturesquely as in another.

Every Tuesday the gay old white-capped women seat themselves with their baskets of fruit or fish against the stone railings of the bridge. And long after the cows at one end of the market and the piles of brilliant-hued salads and carrots at the other have changed owners the liveliest talk goes on, at the bridge and among the men loitering under the mistletoe at the