e fandango, was hidden for the moment under
the austere mantilla of the ceremony. Gracieuse had not been a scholar
for two years, but was none the less the intimate friend of the sisters,
her teachers, ever in their company for songs, novenas, or decorations
of white flowers around the statues of the Holy Virgin.--Then, the
priests, in their most sumptuous costumes, appeared in front of
the magnificent gold of the tabernacle, on a platform elevated and
theatrical, and the mass began, celebrated, in this distant village,
with excessive pomp as in a great city. There were choirs of small
boys chanting in infantile voices with a savage ardor. Then choruses of
little girls, whom a sister accompanied at the harmonium and which the
clear and fresh voice of Gracieuse guided. From time to time a clamor
came, like a storm, from the tribunes above where the men were,
a formidable response animated the old vaults, the old sonorous
wainscoting, which for centuries have vibrated with the same song.--

To do the same things which for numberless ages the ancestors have done
and to tell blindly the same words of faith, are indications of supreme
wisdom, are a supreme force. For all the faithful who sang there came
from this immutable ceremony of the mass a sort of peace, a confused but
soft resignation to coming destruction. Living of the present hour, they
lost a little of their ephemeral personality to attach themselves better
to the dead lying under the slabs and to continue them more exactly, to
form with them and their future descendants only one of these resisting
entireties, of almost infinite duration, which is called a race.

CHAPTER IV.

"Ite missa est!" The high mass is finished and the antique church is
emptying. Outside, in the yard, among the tombs, the assistants scatter.
And all the joy of a sunny noon greets them, as they come out of the
sombre nave where each, according to his naive faculties, had caught
more or less a glimpse of the great mystery and of the inevitable death.

Wearing all the uniform national cap, the men come down the exterior
stairway; the women, slower to be captivated by the lure of the blue
sky, retaining still under the mourning veil a little of the dream of
the church, come out of the lower porticoes in black troops; around a
grave freshly closed, some stop and weep.

The southern wind, which is the great magician of the Basque country,
blows softly. The autumn of yesterday has gone and