let, without a second of hesitation or silence, the
other begins; more and more their minds are animated and inflamed.
Around the smugglers' table many other caps have gathered and all listen
with admiration to the witty or sensible things which the two brothers
know how to say, ever with the needed cadence and rhyme.

At the twentieth stanza, at last, Itchoua interrupts them to make them
rest and he orders more cider.

"How have you learned?" asked Ramuntcho of the Iragola brothers. "How
did the knack come to you?"

"Oh!" replies Marcos, "it is a family trait, as you must know. Our
father, our grandfather were extemporary composers who were heard with
pleasure in all the festivals of the Basque country, and our mother also
was the daughter of a grand improvisator of the village of Lesaca. And
then, every evening in taking back the oxen or in milking the cows, we
practice, or at the fireside on winter nights. Yes, every evening, we
make compositions in this way on subjects which one of us imagines, and
it is our greatest pleasure--"

But when Florentino's turn to sing comes he, knowing only the old
refrains of the mountain, intones in an Arabic falsetto voice the
complaint of the linen weaver; and then Ramuntcho, who had sung it
the day before in the autumn twilight, sees again the darkened sky of
yesterday, the clouds full of rain, the cart drawn by oxen going down
into a sad and closed valley, toward a solitary farm--and suddenly the
unexplained anguish returns to him, the one which he had before; the
fear of living and of passing thus always in these same villages, under
the oppression of these same mountains; the notion and the confused
desire for other places; the anxiety for unknown distances--His eyes,
become lifeless and fixed, look inwardly; for several strange minutes
he feels that he is an exile, from what country he does not know,
disinherited, of what he does not know, sad in the depths of his soul;
between him and the men who surround him have come suddenly irreducible,
hereditary barriers--

Three o'clock. It is the hour when vespers, the last office of the day,
comes to an end; the hour when leave the church, in a meditation grave
as that of the morning, all the mantillas of black cloth concealing the
beautiful hair of the girls and the form of their waists, all the
woolen caps similarly lowered on the shaven faces of men, on their eyes
piercing or somber, still plunged in the old time dreams.

It