is little festival in this corner
closed to the world, threw a little light and joyful noise into the vast
night which the mountains, standing everywhere like giants of shadow,
made more dumb and more black.

CHAPTER VI.

There is to be a grand ball-game next Sunday, for the feast of Saint
Damasus, in the borough of Hasparitz.

Arrochkoa and Ramuntcho, companions in continual expeditions through the
surrounding country, travelled for the entire day, in the little wagon
of the Detcharry family, in order to organize that ball-game, which to
them is a considerable event.

In the first place, they had to consult Marcos, one of the Iragola
brothers. Near a wood, in front of his house in the shade, they found
him seated on a stump of a chestnut tree, always grave and statuesque,
his eyes inspired and his gesture noble, in the act of making his little
brother, still in swaddling clothes, eat soup.

"Is he the eleventh?" they have asked, laughing.

"Oh! Go on!" the big eldest brother has replied, "the eleventh
is running already like a hare in the heather. This is number
twelve!--little John the Baptist, you know, the latest, who, I think,
will not be the last."

And then, lowering their heads not to strike the branches, they had
traversed the woods, the forests of oaks under which extends infinitely
the reddish lace of ferns.

And they have traversed several villages also,--Basque villages, all
grouped around these two things which are the heart of them and which
symbolize their life: the church and the ball-game. Here and there, they
have knocked at the doors of isolated houses, tall and large houses,
carefully whitewashed, with green shades, and wooden balconies where are
drying in the sun strings of red peppers. At length they have talked,
in their language so closed to strangers of France, with the famous
players, the titled champions, the ones whose odd names have been seen
in all the journals of the southwest, on all the posters of Biarritz
or of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and who, in ordinary life, are honest country
inn-keepers, blacksmiths, smugglers, with waistcoat thrown over the
shoulder and shirt sleeves rolled on bronze arms.

Now that all is settled and that the last words have been exchanged,
it is too late to return that night to Etchezar; then, following their
errant habits, they select for the night a village which they like,
Zitzarry, for example, where they have gone often for their smuggling
busin