the Gizune--darken the lands piled up
above and under, the mass of brown hills, colored by the death of the
ferns--

Oh! the melancholy apparition of the native land, to the soldier who
returns and will not find his sweetheart--!

Three years have passed since he left here.--Well, three years, at his
age, are an abyss of time, a period which changes all things. And,
after that lone exile, how this village, which he adores, appears to
him diminished, small, walled in the mountains, sad and hidden!--In the
depth of his mind of a tall, uncultured boy, commences again, to make
him suffer more, the struggle of those two sentiments of a too refined
man, which are an inheritance of his unknown father: an attachment
almost maladive to the home, to the land of childhood, and a fear of
returning to be enclosed in it, when there exist in the world other
places so vast and so free. --After the warm afternoon, the autumn is
indicated now by the hasty fall of the day, with a coolness ascending
suddenly from the valleys underneath, a scent of dying leaves and of
moss. And then the thousand details of preceding autumns in the Basque
country, of the former Novembers, come to him very precisely; the cold
fall of night succeeding the beautiful, sunlit day; the sad clouds
appearing with the night; the Pyrenees confounded in vapors inky gray,
or, in places, cut in black silhouettes on a pale, golden sky; around
the houses, the belated flowers of the gardens, which the frost spares
for a long time here, and, in front of all the doors, the strewn leaves
of the plane-trees, the yellow strewn leaves cracking under the steps of
the man returning in sandals to his home for supper.--Oh, the heedless
joy of these returns to the home, in the nights of other times, after
days of marching on the rude mountain! Oh, the gaiety, in that time,
of the first winter fires--in the tall, smoky hearth ornamented with a
drapery of white calico and with a strip of pink paper. No, in the
city, with its rows of houses one does not have the real impression of
returning home, of earthing up like plants at night in the primitive
manner, as one has it here, under those Basque roofs, solitary in the
midst of the country, with the grand, surrounding black, the grand,
shivering black of the foliage, the grand, changing black of the clouds
and the summits.--But to-day, his travels, his new conceptions, have
diminished and spoiled his mountaineer's home; he will doubtless