a refuses
to be called a Spaniard. He is a Basque. Reluctantly he admits having
been born in San Sebastian, outpost of Cosmopolis on the mountainous
coast of Guipuzcoa, where a stern-featured race of mountaineers and
fishermen, whose prominent noses, high ruddy cheek-bones and square
jowls are gradually becoming known to the world through the paintings
of the Zubiaurre, clings to its ancient un-Aryan language and its
ancient song and customs with the hard-headedness of hill people the
world over.

From the first Spanish discoveries in America till the time of our own
New England clipper ships, the Basque coast was the backbone of Spanish
trade. The three provinces were the only ones which kept their
privileges and their municipal liberties all through the process of the
centralizing of the Spanish monarchy with cross and faggot, which
historians call the great period of Spain. The rocky inlets in the
mountains were full of shipyards that turned out privateers and
merchantmen manned by lanky broad-shouldered men with hard red-beaked
faces and huge hands coarsened by generations of straining on heavy
oars and halyards,--men who feared only God and the sea-spirits of
their strange mythology and were a law unto themselves, adventurers and
bigots.

It was not till the Nineteenth century that the Carlist wars and the
passing of sailing ships broke the prosperous independence of the
Basque provinces and threw them once for all into the main current of
Spanish life. Now papermills take the place of shipyards, and instead
of the great fleet that went off every year to fish the Newfoundland
and Iceland banks, a few steam trawlers harry the sardines in the Bay
of Biscay. The world war, too, did much to make Bilboa one of the
industrial centers of Spain, even restoring in some measure the ancient
prosperity of its shipping.

Pio Baroja spent his childhood on this rainy coast between green
mountains and green sea. There were old aunts who filled his ears up
with legends of former mercantile glory, with talk of sea captains and
slavers and shipwrecks. Born in the late seventies, Baroja left the
mist-filled inlets of Guipuzcoa to study medicine in Madrid, febrile
capital full of the artificial scurry of government, on the dry upland
plateau of New Castile. He even practiced, reluctantly enough, in a
town near Valencia, where he must have acquired his distaste for the
Mediterranean and the Latin genius, and, later, in his own provi