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To roll for hours on the small Pyrenean roads, to change places almost
every day, to traverse the Basque country, to go from one village
to another, called here by a festival, there by an adventure on the
frontier--this was now Ramuntcho's life, the errant life which the
ball-game made for him in the day-time and smuggling in the night-time.

Ascents, descents, in the midst of a monotonous display of verdure.
Woods of oaks and of beeches, almost inviolate, and remaining as they
were in the quiet centuries.--When he passed by some antique house,
hidden in these solitudes of trees, he stopped to enjoy reading, above
the door, the traditional legend inscribed in the granite: "Ave Maria!
in the year 1600, or in the year 1500, such a one, from such a village,
has built this house, to live in it with such a one, his wife."

Very far from all human habitation, in a corner of a ravine, where
it was warmer than elsewhere, sheltered from all breezes, they met a
peddler of holy images, who was wiping his forehead. He had set down
his basket, full of those colored prints with gilt frames that represent
saints with Euskarian legends, and with which the Basques like to adorn
their old rooms with white walls. And he was there, exhausted from
fatigue and heat, as if wrecked in the ferns, at a turn of those little,
mountain routes which run solitary under oaks.

Gracieuse came down and bought a Holy Virgin.

"Later," she said to Ramuntcho, "we shall put it in our house as a
souvenir--"

And the image, dazzling in its gold frame, went with them under the
long, green vaults--

They went out of their path, for they wished to pass by a certain valley
of the Cherry-trees, not in the hope of finding cherries in it, in
April, but to show to Gracieuse the place, which is renowned in the
entire Basque country.

It was almost five o'clock, the sun was already low, when they reached
there. It was a shaded and calm region, where the spring twilight
descended like a caress on the magnificence of the April foliage. The
air was cool and suave, fragrant with hay, with acacia. Mountains--very
high, especially toward the north, to make the climate there softer,
surrounded it on all sides, investing it with a melancholy mystery of
closed Edens.

And, when the cherry-trees appeared, they were a gay surprise, they were
already red.

There was nobody on these paths, above which the grand cherry-trees
extended like a roof, their branches dripp