ush of dawn, at the
instant when shepherds and fisherman awake, they were returning
joyously, the smugglers, having finished their undertaking.

Having started on foot and gone, with infinite precautions to be silent,
through ravines, through woods, through fords of rivers, they were
returning, as if they were people who had never anything to conceal from
anybody, in a bark of Fontarabia, hired under the eyes of Spain's custom
house officers, through the Bidassoa river.

All the mass of mountains and of clouds, all the sombre chaos of the
preceding night had disentangled itself almost suddenly, as under the
touch of a magic wand. The Pyrenees, returned to their real proportions,
were only average mountains, with slopes bathed in a shadow still
nocturnal, but with peaks neatly cut in a sky which was already
clearing. The air had become lukewarm, suave, exquisite, as if the
climate or the season had suddenly changed,--and it was the southern
wind which was beginning to blow, the delicious southern wind special to
the Basque country, which chases before it, the cold, the clouds and
the mists, which enlivens the shades of all things, makes the sky blue,
prolongs the horizons infinitely and gives, even in winter, summer
illusions.

The boatman who was bringing the smugglers back to France pushed the
bottom of the river with his long pole, and the bark dragged, half
stranded. At this moment, that Bidassoa by which the two countries are
separated, seemed drained, and its antique bed, excessively large, had
the flat extent of a small desert.

The day was decidedly breaking, tranquil and slightly pink. It was the
first of the month of November; on the Spanish shore, very distant, in
a monastery, an early morning bell rang clear, announcing the religious
solemnity of every autumn. And Ramuntcho, comfortably seated in the
bark, softly cradled and rested after the fatigues of the night,
breathed the new breeze with well-being in all his senses. With a
childish joy, he saw the assurance of a radiant weather for that
All-Saints' Day which was to bring to him all that he knew of this
world's festivals: the chanted high mass, the game of pelota before
the assembled village, then, at last, the dance of the evening with
Gracieuse, the fandango in the moon-light on the church square.

He lost, little by little, the consciousness of his physical life,
Ramuntcho, after his sleepless night; a sort of torpor, benevolent under
the breath