s, and sure that their counsel shall be
respected in the national game, which the men here attend with pride
as on a field of honor.--After a courteous discussion, the game is
arranged; it will be immediately after vespers; they will play the
"blaid" with the wicker glove, and the six selected champions, divided
into two camps, shall be the vicar, Ramuntcho and Arrochkoa, Gracieuse's
brother, against three famous men of the neighboring villages: Joachim
of Mendiazpi; Florentino of Espelette, and Irrubeta of Hasparren--

Now comes the "convoy", which comes out of the church and passes by
them, so black in this feast of light, and so archaic, with the envelope
of its capes, of its caps and of its veils. They are expressive of the
Middle Age, these people, while they pass in a file, the Middle Age
whose shadow the Basque country retains. And they express, above all,
death, as the large funereal slabs, with which the nave is paved,
express it, as the cypress trees and the tombs express it, and all the
things in this place, where the men come to pray, express it: death,
always death.--But a death very softly neighboring life, under the
shield of the old consoling symbols--for life is there marked also,
almost equally sovereign, in the warm rays which light up the cemetery,
in the eyes of the children who play among the roses of autumn, in
the smile of those beautiful brown girls who, the mass being finished,
return with steps indolently supple toward the village; in the muscles
of all this youthfulness of men, alert and vigorous, who shall soon
exercise at the ball-game their iron legs and arms.--And of this group
of old men and of boys at the threshold of a church, of this mingling,
so peacefully harmonious, of death and of life, comes the benevolent
lesson, the teaching that one must enjoy in time strength and love;
then, without obstinacy in enduring, submit to the universal law of
passing and dying, repeating with confidence, like these simple-minded
and wise men, the same prayers by which the agonies of the ancestors
were cradled.--

It is improbably radiant, the sun of noon in this yard of the dead.
The air is exquisite and one becomes intoxicated by breathing it. The
Pyrenean horizons have been swept of their clouds, their least
vapors, and it seems as if the wind of the south had brought here the
limpidities of Andalusia or of Africa.

The Basque guitar and tambourine accompany the sung seguilla, which the
beggars