the argument, since I myself was the doer of the wrong; but, of course,
I should have hotly denounced any other such philosopher as a villain
and rogue.

The night flew by, and to our surprise we found 240 miles had slipped
away and we were in Bayonne. Thirty minutes more and we were speeding
south, and soon crossed the Bidassoa, the boundary between France and
Spain. Then my wife saying, "Now I will sleep," laid her head on the
shoulder of the happiest man in or out of Spain, and in ten minutes her
regular breathing told me she was in the land of dreams.

The Pyrenees, in dividing France and Spain, stand between two distinct
peoples, and as the centuries go by the streams of national life meet,
but only to repel each other, never to mingle. One has but to cross the
bank to realize that he is among a different race. Dress, food and
cooking--social life, religious devotion, modes of thought--are all
different. To us here in America it is difficult to realize that so
slight a thing as a mountain barrier, easily traversed, crossed by many
defiles and good roads, should continue to separate two distinct
peoples. But so it is. Stranger still, for nearly all time the
inhabitants of the Spanish mountains have been more or less opposed to
the people of the Spanish plains, and every century has seen several
insurrections among the mountaineers. In 1872 and '73 the Carlists held
the mountains and more or less fusillading was going on. The possibility
of my way being blocked by the Carlists never entered into my
calculations.

The railway from Bayonne to Madrid is owned in Paris, and it seems that
the directors were paying blackmail to Don Carlos, ostensibly to him,
but really to several marauding bands who plundered under the name of
fighting for the Don, upon the understanding that the railroad was not
to be meddled with. The directors had been paying 100,000 francs a
month. As will be easily believed, there was a difficulty in the
distribution of the money among so many greedy and inartistic robbers,
and the discontented determined to hold up the railroad itself and stop
all trains. Unluckily, the train we were on was the one they proposed to
experiment on first, and they proposed drastic measures, too--in fact,
had blown up or down a short tunnel, and torn up the rails in front of
our train. As we crossed the frontier a French gendarme and Spanish
civil guard appeared, demanding passports. It was, of course, a sure
thing t