. . . Me will show thee me be
Biscayan, and gentleman by land, gentleman by sea, gentleman in spite of
Devil; and thou lie if thou say the contrary.'"
It is a scene which will have lived in the memory of every reader, and I
recurred to it hopefully but vainly in San Sebastian, where this fiery
threefold gentleman might have lived in his time. It would be
interesting to know how far the Basques speak broken Spanish in a
fashion of their own, which Cervantes tried to represent in the talk of
his Biscayan. Like the Welsh again they strenuously keep their
immemorial language against the inroads of the neighboring speech. How
much they fix it in a modern literature it would be easier to ask than
to say. I suppose there must be Basque newspapers; perhaps there are
Basque novelists, there are notoriously Basque bards who recite their
verses to the peasants, and doubtless there are poets who print their
rhymes: and I blame myself for not inquiring further concerning them of
that kindly Basque banker who wished so much to do something for me in
compensation for the loss of my worthless letter. I knew, too cheaply,
that the Basques have their poetical contests, as the Welsh have their
musical competitions in the Eisteddfod, and they are once more like the
Welsh, their brothers in antiquity, in calling themselves by a national
name of their own. They call themselves Euskaldunac, which is as
different from the name of Basque given them by the alien races as Cymru
is from Welsh.
All this lore I have easily accumulated from the guide-books since
leaving San Sebastian, but I was carelessly ignorant of it in driving
from the hotel to the station when we came away, and was much concerned
in the overtures made us in a mixed Spanish, English, and French by a
charming family from Chili, through the brother to one of the ladies and
luisband to the other. When he perceived from my Spanish that we were
not English, he rejoiced that we were Americans of the north, and as
joyfully proclaimed that they were Americans of the south. We were at
once sensible of a community of spirit in our difference from our
different ancestral races. They were Spanish, but with a New World
blitheness which we nowhere afterward found in the native Spaniards; and
we were English, with a willingness to laugh and to joke which they had
not perhaps noted in our ancestral contemporaries. Again and again we
met them in the different cities where we feared we had lost them, until
we feared no more and counted confidently on seeing them wherever we
went. They were always radiantly smiling; and upon this narrow ground I
am going to base the conjecture that the most distinctive difference of
the Western Hemisphere from the Eastern is its habit of seeing the fun
of things.
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