For instance, the Landais believe that in certain maladies the physician has no power, and that recourse must be had, for relief, to certain gifted persons, who will propitiate the evil spirit who caused the ill.

They attribute great virtue to what they call _les Veyrines_, namely, narrow openings in the thickness of the pillars of a church: persons affected with rheumatic diseases, have only to pass through these narrow spaces, repeating at the time certain prayers, having previously made the circuit of the pillar nine times.

His head is first inserted, and the rest of his body is pushed through by his friends.
These practices are, in spite of the exertions of the clergy, said to be still carried on in secret.
In the month of May they strew the street before their houses with reeds, on fete days, and there they frequently pass their evenings, sitting in groups, and telling to each other superstitious stories, which are eagerly listened to, and thus handed down from father to son.
The _orfraie_ and the screech-owl are looked upon with terror in the Landes: their approach to any dwelling bodes evil in all forms: the dead quit their tombs at night and flit about in the fens, and covered with their white shrouds come wandering into the villages, nor will they quit them till the prayers and alms of their friends have calmed their perturbed spirits.
The various tribes of the Landes, form, as it were, in the midst of France, a separate people, from their habits and customs: they are called, according to their locality, Bouges, Parants, Mazansins, Couziots, or Lanusquets: they are generally a meagre race, and subject to nervous affections; taking little nourishment, and living a life of privation and fatigue.

Obliged to labour for their support, like most people in the departments of the Pyrenees, and to dispose of the products of their industry, they have usually fixed places of repose; each peasant drives his cart drawn by two oxen, and carries with him the food for those patient animals, who are the very picture of endurance.
His own food is generally coarse, ill-leavened bread, very hardly baked, and made of coarse maize, or rye-flour, which he sometimes relishes with _sardines_ of Galicia.

He gives his oxen a preparation of dried linseed from which the oil has been extracted, and which he has made into flour, and he then lets them loose on the Landes for a time, while he snatches a hasty sleep, soon interrupted to resume his journey.