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. With those dear Chilians we saw the fun of many little
hardships of travel which might have been insupportable without the
vision. Sometimes we surprised one another in the same hotel; sometimes
it was in the street that we encountered, usually to exchange amusing
misfortunes. If we could have been constantly with these
fellow-hemispherists our progress through Spain would have been an
unbroken holiday.
There is a superstition of travelers in Spain, much fostered by
innkeepers and porters, that you cannot get seats in the fast trains
without buying your tickets the day before, and then perhaps not, and we
abandoned ourselves to this fear at San Sebastian so far as to get
places some hours in advance. But once established in the ten-foot-wide
interior of the first-class compartment which we had to ourselves, every
anxiety fell from us; and I do not know a more flattering emotion than
that which you experience in sinking into your luxurious seat, and,
after a glance at your hand-bags in the racks where they have been put
with no strain on your own muscles, giving your eyes altogether to the
joy of the novel landscape.
The train was what they call a Rapido in Spain; and though we were
supposed to be devouring space with indiscriminate gluttony, I do not
think that in our mad rush of twenty-five miles an hour we failed to
taste any essential detail of the scenery. .But I wish now that I had
known the Basques were all nobles, and that the peasants owned many of
the little farms we saw declaring the general thrift. In the first two
hours of the six to Burgos we ran through lovely valleys held in the
embrace of gentle hills, where the fields of Indian corn were varied by
groves of chestnut trees, where we could see the burrs gaping on their
stems. The blades and tassels of the corn had been stripped away,
leaving the ripe ears a-tilt at the top of the stalks, which looked like
cranes standing on one leg with their heads slanted in pensive
contemplation. There were no vineyards, but orchards aplenty near the
farmhouses, and all about there were other trees pollarded to the quick
and tufted with mistletoe, not only the stout oaks, but the slim poplars
trimmed up into tall plumes like the poplars in southern France. The
houses, when they did not stand apart like our own farmhouses, gathered
into gray-brown villages around some high-shouldered church with a
bell-tower in front or at one corner of the fagade. In most of the
larger houses an economy of the sun's heat, the only heat recognized in
the winter of southern countries, was practised by glassing in the
balconies that stretched quite across their fronts and kept the cold
from at least one story. It gave them a very cheery look, and must have
made them livable at least in the daytime. Now and then the tall
chimney of one of those manufactories we had seen on the way from Irun
invited belief in the march of industrial prosperity; but whether the
Basque who took work in a mill or a foundry forfeited his nobility
remained a part of the universal Basque secret. From time to time a
mountain stream brawled from under a world-old bridge, and then spread a
quiet tide for the women to kneel beside and wash the clothes which they
spread to dry on every bush and grassy slope of the banks.
The whole scene changed after we ran out of the Basque country and into
the austere landscape of old Castile. The hills retreated and swelled
into mountains that were not less than terrible in their savage
nakedness. The fields of corn and the orchards ceased, and the green of
the pastures changed to the tawny gray of the measureless wheat-lands
into which the valleys flattened and widened. There were no longer any
factory chimneys; the villages seemed to turn from stone to mud; the
human poverty showed itself in the few patched and tattered figures that
followed the oxen in the interminable furrows shallowly scraping the
surface of the lonely levels. The haggard mountain ranges were of stone
that seemed blanched with geologic superannuation, and at one place we
ran by a wall of hoary rock that drew its line a mile long against the
sky, and then broke and fell, and then staggered up again in a
succession of titanic bulks.
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