Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 137, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 June 1910 — QUAINT BRETON VILLAGE. [ARTICLE]

QUAINT BRETON VILLAGE.

Sketches of the Kitchen and Company of an Ancient Inn. '' Change seldom visits a Breton village, Its sentiment is of the past and its people are rooted to their customs as firmly as their oaks to the soil. Their houses of solid masonry appear to belong to the ground, somber in color as, though blackened by the ages and immovable to the end of time, and yet the ancient tavern, landmark of decades, has long since been demolished. The hotel at the head of the place bespoke a certain ordered decorousuess not to be trifled with, but the old inn at the foot was Bohemia itself, rays a writer in Scribner’s. Dogs occupied equal room with the proper guests. In the rangy kitchen, the time-darkened fire-place was framed in A —blazonment of brass and copper utensils which blinked, flashed, glowed, according to the ever-changing humor of the light. Flanking the fireplace were two great Breton beds, one richly carved, into which at some mysterious hour crept, as into a ship’s berth, the mistress and her maids, to dream behind their latticed doors as in the days when each man shut himself from nocturnal prowlers behind such bars. At the long table a frequenter might find it necessary to push aside the salad to make room for his glass. The dining room just beyond was paneled from ceiling to wainscot with the work of many men. It would seem that most of the painters of the world had at some time journeyed to Pont-Aven! Here manners were of the easiest, and after,dinner, at which the artists elbowed the collectors of taxes, the rubicund Capitalize de la Douane, and the little notary, the air would grow heavy with a fog of tobacco fumes, but crackling with quip and repartee; if, on leaving, a guest stumbled over the dogs lying at the threshold, the saturnine Patron would swear—but not at the dogs!