range catastrophe, was really pitiable, and we hastened to escape
from it to a shop across the street. There instantly a small boy rushed
enterprisingly out and brought back with him a very pretty girl who
spoke most of the little French which has made its way in San Sebastian
against the combined Basque and Spanish, and a cap of the right flatness
and redness was brought. I must not forget, among the pleasures done us
by the place, the pastry cook's shop which advertised in English "Tea
at all Hours," and which at that hour of our afternoon we now found so
opportune, that it seemed almost personally attentive to us as the only
Anglo-Saxon visitors in town. The tea might have been better, but it was
as good as it knew how; and the small boy who came in with his mother
(the Spanish mother seldom fails of the company of a small boy) in her
moments of distraction succeeded in touching with his finger all the
pieces of pastry except those we were eating.

VII.

The high aquiline nose which is characteristic of the autochthonic race
abounds in San Sebastian, but we saw no signs of the high temper which
is said to go with it. This, indeed, was known to me chiefly from my
first reading in _Don Quixote,_ of the terrific combat between the
squire of the Biscayan ladies whose carriage the knight of La Mancha
stopped after his engagement with the windmills. In their exchange of
insults incident to the knight's desire that the ladies should go to
Toboso and thank Dulcinea for his delivery of them from the necromancers
he had put to flight in the persons of two Benedictine monks, "'Get
gone,' the squire called, in bad Spanish and worse Biscayan, 'Get gone,
thou knight, and Devil go with thou; or by He Who me create... me kill
thee now so sure as me be Biscayan,'" and when the knight called him an
"inconsiderable mortal," and said that if he were a gentleman he would
chastise him: "'What! me no gentleman?' replied the Biscayan. 'I swear
thou be liar as me be Christian.... 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