of the planes and sycamores, in the branches of which the birds were
singing their welcome to one of the first days of spring.

Chapter 3. The Catalans.

Beyond a bare, weather-worn wall, about a hundred paces from the spot
where the two friends sat looking and listening as they drank their
wine, was the village of the Catalans. Long ago this mysterious colony
quitted Spain, and settled on the tongue of land on which it is to this
day. Whence it came no one knew, and it spoke an unknown tongue. One of
its chiefs, who understood Provencal, begged the commune of Marseilles
to give them this bare and barren promontory, where, like the sailors of
old, they had run their boats ashore. The request was granted; and three
months afterwards, around the twelve or fifteen small vessels which
had brought these gypsies of the sea, a small village sprang up. This
village, constructed in a singular and picturesque manner, half Moorish,
half Spanish, still remains, and is inhabited by descendants of the
first comers, who speak the language of their fathers. For three or four
centuries they have remained upon this small promontory, on which
they had settled like a flight of seabirds, without mixing with the
Marseillaise population, intermarrying, and preserving their original
customs and the costume of their mother-country as they have preserved
its language.

Our readers will follow us along the only street of this little village,
and enter with us one of the houses, which is sunburned to the beautiful
dead-leaf color peculiar to the buildings of the country, and within
coated with whitewash, like a Spanish posada. A young and beautiful
girl, with hair as black as jet, her eyes as velvety as the gazelle's,
was leaning with her back against the wainscot, rubbing in her slender
delicately moulded fingers a bunch of heath blossoms, the flowers of
which she was picking off and strewing on the floor; her arms, bare to
the elbow, brown, and modelled after those of the Arlesian Venus, moved
with a kind of restless impatience, and she tapped the earth with her
arched and supple foot, so as to display the pure and full shape of her
well-turned leg, in its red cotton, gray and blue clocked, stocking. At
three paces from her, seated in a chair which he balanced on two legs,
leaning his elbow on an old worm-eaten table, was a tall young man of
twenty, or two-and-twenty, who was looking at her with an air in which
vexation and uneasiness we