t which passes
like all things and which one forgets at the following spring.

Everywhere, in the wet of the leaves strewing the earth, in the wet
of the herbs long and bent, there was a sadness of death, a dumb
resignation to fecund decomposition.

But the autumn, when it comes to put an end to the plants, brings only
a sort of far-off warning to man, a little more durable, who resists
several winters and lets himself be lured several times by the charm
of spring. Man, in the rainy nights of October and of November, feels
especially the instinctive desire to seek shelter at home, to warm
himself at the hearth, under the roof which so many thousand years
amassed have taught him progressively to build.--And Ramuntcho felt
awakening in the depths of his being the old ancestral aspirations for
the Basque home of the country, the isolated home, unattached to the
neighboring homes. He hastened his steps the more toward the primitive
dwelling where his mother was waiting for him.

Here and there, one perceived them in the distance, indistinct in the
twilight, the Basque houses, very distant from one another, dots white
or grayish, now in the depth of some gorge steeped in darkness, then on
some ledge of the mountains with summits lost in the obscure sky. Almost
inconsequential are these human habitations, in the immense and confused
entirety of things; inconsequential and even annihilated quite, at
this hour, before the majesty of the solitude and of the eternal forest
nature.

Ramuntcho ascended rapidly, lithe, bold and young, still a child, likely
to play on his road as little mountaineers play, with a rock, a reed, or
a twig that one whittles while walking. The air was growing sharper,
the environment harsher, and already he ceased to hear the cries of the
curlews, their rusty-pulley cries, on the rivers beneath. But Ramuntcho
was singing one of those plaintive songs of the olden time, which are
still transmitted in the depths of the distant lands, and his naive
voice went through the mist or the rain, among the wet branches of the
oaks, under the grand shroud, more and more sombre, of isolation, of
autumn and of night.

He stopped for an instant, pensive, to see a cart drawn by oxen pass
at a great distance above him. The cowboy who drove the slow team sang
also; through a bad and rocky path, they descended into a ravine bathed
in shadows already nocturnal.

And soon they disappeared in a turn of the path, masked s