n.

"'Alack! What will become of me! Senor Oficial, have pity on me! You are
so young, so good-looking.' Then, in a lower tone, she said, 'Let me get
away, and I'll give you a bit of the _bar lachi_, that will make every
woman fall in love with you!'

"The _bar lachi_, sir, is the loadstone, with which the gipsies declare
one who knows how to use it can cast any number of spells. If you can
make a woman drink a little scrap of it, powdered, in a glass of white
wine, she'll never be able to resist you. I answered, as gravely as I
could:

"'We are not here to talk nonsense. You'll have to go to prison. Those
are my orders, and there's no help for it!'

"We men from the Basque country have an accent which all Spaniards
easily recognise; on the other hand, not one of them can ever learn to
say _Bai, jaona_!*

* Yes, sir.

"So Carmen easily guessed I was from the Provinces. You know, sir, that
the gipsies, who belong to no particular country, and are always moving
about, speak every language, and most of them are quite at home in
Portugal, in France, in our Provinces, in Catalonia, or anywhere else.
They can even make themselves understood by Moors and English people.
Carmen knew Basque tolerably well.

"'_Laguna ene bihotsarena_, comrade of my heart,' said she suddenly. 'Do
you belong to our country?'

"Our language is so beautiful, sir, that when we hear it in a foreign
country it makes us quiver. I wish," added the bandit in a lower tone,
"I could have a confessor from my own country."

After a silence, he began again.

"'I belong to Elizondo,' I answered in Basque, very much affected by the
sound of my own language.

"'I come from Etchalar,' said she (that's a district about four hours'
journey from my home). 'I was carried off to Seville by the gipsies.
I was working in the factory to earn enough money to take me back to
Navarre, to my poor old mother, who has no support in the world but me,
besides her little _barratcea_* with twenty cider-apple trees in it.
Ah! if I were only back in my own country, looking up at the white
mountains! I have been insulted here, because I don't belong to this
land of rogues and sellers of rotten oranges; and those hussies are
all banded together against me, because I told them that not all their
Seville _jacques_,** and all their knives, would frighten an honest lad
from our country, with his blue cap and his _maquila_! Good comrade,
won't you do anything to help you