ing
down a hillside in companies of half a dozen, make altogether a most
impressive appearance. With their smooth chins and childish caps, they
may be taken, in the distance, for a lot of very naughty little boys.
They have always a cigarette in their teeth.

The best thing at Biarritz is your opportunity for driving over into
Spain. Coming speedily to a consciousness of this fact, I found a charm
in sitting in a landau and rolling away to San Sebastian, behind a
driver in a high glazed hat with long streamers, a jacket of scarlet and
silver, and a pair of yellow breeches and of jack-boots. If it has been
the desire of one's heart and the dream of one's life to visit the land
of Cervantes, even grazing it so lightly as by a day's excursion from
Biarritz is a matter to set one romancing. Everything helping--the
admirable scenery, the charming day, my operatic coachman, and
smooth-rolling carriage--I am afraid I romanced more than it is decent
to tell of. You face toward the beautifully outlined mass of the
Pyrenees, as if you were going to plunge straight into them, but in
reality you travel beneath them and beside them; you pass between their
expiring spurs and the sea. It is on proceeding beyond San Sebastian
that you seriously attack them. But they are already extremely
picturesque--none the less so that in this region they abound in
suggestion of the recent Carlist war. Their far-away peaks and ridges
are crowned with lonely Spanish watch-towers and their lower slopes are
dotted with demolished dwellings. It was hereabouts that the fighting
was most constant. But the healing powers of nature are as remarkable as
the destructive powers of man, and the rich September landscape appeared
already to have forgotten the injuries of yesterday. Everything seemed
to me a savory foretaste of Spain. I discovered an unconscionable amount
of local color. I discovered it at St. Jean de Luz, the last French
town, in a great brown church, filled with galleries and boxes, like a
playhouse--the altar and chair, indeed, looked very much like a
proscenium; at Bohebia, on the Bidassoa, the small yellow stream which
divides France from Spain, and which at this point offers to view the
celebrated Isle of Pheasants, a little bushy strip of earth adorned with
a decayed commemorative monument, on which, in the seventeenth century,
the affairs of Louis XIV. and his brother monarch were discussed in
ornamental conference; at Fuentarabia (gloriou