uddenly by
trees, as if they had vanished in an abyss. Then Ramuntcho felt the
grasp of an unexpected melancholy, unexplained like most of his complex
impressions, and, with an habitual gesture, while he resumed his less
alert march, he brought down like a visor on his gray eyes, very sharp
and very soft, the crown of his woolen Basque cap.

Why?--What had to do with him this cart, this singing cowboy whom he
did not even know? Evidently nothing--and yet, for having seen them
disappear into a lodging, as they did doubtless every night, into some
farm isolated in a lowland, a more exact realization had come to him of
the humble life of the peasant, attached to the soil and to the native
field, of those human lives as destitute of joy as beasts of burden, but
with declines more prolonged and more lamentable. And, at the same time,
through his mind had passed the intuitive anxiety for other places, for
the thousand other things that one may see or do in this world and
which one may enjoy; a chaos of troubling half thoughts, of atavic
reminiscences and of phantoms had furtively marked themselves in the
depths of his savage child's mind--

For Ramuntcho was a mixture of two races very different and of two
beings separated, if one may say it, by an abyss of several generations.
Created by the sad fantasy of one of the refined personages of our
dazzled epoch, he had been inscribed at his birth as the "son of an
unknown father" and he bore no other name than that of his mother. So,
he did not feel that he was quite similar to his companions in games and
healthy fatigues.

Silent for a moment, he walked less quickly toward his house, on the
deserted paths winding on the heights. In him, the chaos of other
things, of the luminous "other places", of the splendors or of the
terrors foreign to his own life, agitated itself confusedly, trying
to disentangle itself--But no, all this, being indistinct and
incomprehensible, remained formless in the darkness.

At last, thinking no more of it, he began to sing his song again. The
song told, in monotonous couplets, the complaint of a linen weaver whose
lover in a distant war prolonged his absence. It was written in that
mysterious Euskarian language, the age of which seems incalculable and
the origin of which remains unknown. And little by little, under the
influence of the ancient melody, of the wind and of the solitude,
Ramuntcho found himself as he was at the beginning of his walk,