marvellous spinster; although very old, she
might serve as a model to any housewife. She
may be seen of an evening at the fountain
of Vorvaye, seated on a hawthorn-bush;
she spins all the night through her distaff of
flax finer and more glistening than the
moonbeams; she whirls her spindle rapidly, and sings
to a sad and low chant unintelligible words, in
a voice so faint and feeble that the rattling of
her nails on the iron of the distaff renders it
impossible even to guess in what language are
the words of her song. Old, and worn, and
toothless as she is, you will find in the morning
all the bushes covered with the fruit of her
night's labour. Her features are soft and regular;
her complexion, despite her great age, is
clear and fresh; and her blue and white clothes
are always beautifully clean. As Vorvaye is a
marshy spot, she always sits on a bush, and takes,
by choice, a hawthorn. She washes her thread
at the spring of Vorvaye, and, having bestowed
on it the quality of dissolving soap and rendering
linen spotlessly white, the washerwomen who
take a pride in the fair colour of their clothes
resort thither in numbers. And as, in order to
keep their places, they must pass the night on
the spot, they see at dawn her glistening silver
threads which wave among the branches of the
furze, and which the angels wind to weave the
robes of the virgins whom God has called to the
sides to follow in the train of the Queen of
Heaven.

Never has she been seen idle: she spins and
spins her life long; sometimes she is to be seen
at Vorvaye, sometimes at the fence of Malobe,
from whence has been taken her name, and
which she allows no one to cross when she is
there. Occasionally she has been met running
among the warrens, waving her distaff and
pursuing a number of animals of fantastic shapes;
and she has much ado to keep away the Menée
Ankine, which would infallibly break and
entangle all her thread.

This Menée Ankine, well known through
all parts of Brittany under various names, is
a pack composed of dogs, foxes, cats, badgers,
martens, ferrets; in short, all sorts of
carnivorous animals which have lived, and which,
returning to the earth, assume the most enormous
proportions. They howl, yell, bark, mew,
utter all the sounds that once naturally
belonged to them, and drive before them pell-mell
horses, cows, asses, calves, pigs, fowls, ducks,
turkeys, that have been left at night in the fields
or without the fowl-houses; the poor creatures
flying in terror with cries of distress before the
infernal pack. And though at every turning some
fall exhausted, the number of victims continually
increases.

Woe to the man who. crosses the path of the
Menée Ankine! Never does he live to tell
the tale, for, next morning, his lifeless body is
found among the mangled and half-devoured
remains of the various animals that have been
run down and destroyed.

Jeanne alone has no fear of the Menée, and
she will not suffer it to cross her domains.
Jeanne has never harmed any one, yet she is
feared and fled from. Often she weeps on the
border of the marshes by the road that leads to
Bignon, and she only looks up and ceases her
work when the man without a head, who
wanders in those places, passes by. The man
without a head is as great a mystery as Jeanne.

About thirty years ago he met and spoke to
a woman of the pays, named Catherine Signeury.
What he said she never revealed to mortal—not
even to her confessor—and from that day she
ceased not to speak of her approaching end.
She fell into a state of languor from which no
medicine could revive her, and she died without
any visible malady some months afterwards, only
saying, "The Headless Man of the Bignon-
road predicted it to me."

Jeanne Malobe knows him and his history,
but no one has ever dared to question her
concerning it or her own; and when he has passed
her by, saluting her with a wave of his hand,
she resumes her spindle and distaff, and begins
once more the spinning of the silver thread
which it is said that she must spin eternally, to
make the vestments of the virgins and the
saints.

THE FAIRIES OF THE RANCE.

The Fairies of the Rance are as good as they
are pretty. They are not like the cruel Lady
of the Bec-Dupuy, nor Campion's Hare, nor the
Den-Bleiz, the terrible Loup-Garou, The Den-
Bleiz, a fierce and savage wolf, is a man deprived
of his natural form after being excommunicated
for committing many dreadful crimes, followed
by a false oath on the Cross. He is destined to
wander every night in the form of a wolf, and
to roam hill and dale until he can receive from
the hand of a child of twelve years old a wound
with a knife in the middle of the forehead. As,
however, no child has yet been found disposed
to bar his passage, the Den-Bleiz, or Loup-
Garou, wanders still.

If you want to see the Fairies of the Rance,
you must come to its borders when the wind
howls, mingling with the voice of the thunder,
when the sky lowers, and the waters of the river
dash against the rocks. There, on the dark and
troubled waves, you will see hundreds of tiny
figures, blue, white, rose, lilac, green, dancing,
floating, disappearing beneath the water, springing
into the air, forming chains and circles of
fantastic dances; or, languidly stretched on the
surface of the tide, their heads resting on their
hands, these lovely imps, clothed in all the
colours of the rainbow, idly follow the caprices
of the stream which rocks them, now scattering,
now throwing them together, till it brings them
to the mouth of some little tributary, where
they assemble in crowds round one figure yet
lovelier than all the rest.

This being, clad in floating robes of gossamer,
crowned with diamonds, and seated in a bark
formed of a nautilus-shell, drawn by two crayfish
with emerald eyes, is the queen of the glittering
band, and these aërial forms which spring
from the clefts and hollows of the rocks are the
fairies and genii who have empire over the