is the hour when the games are to begin, the dances, the pelota and
the fandango. All this is traditional and immutable.

The light of the day becomes more golden, one feels the approach of
night. The church, suddenly empty, forgotten, where persists the odor
of incense, becomes full of silence, and the old gold of the background
shines mysteriously in the midst of more shade; silence also is
scattered around on the tranquil enclosure of the dead, where the folks
this time passed without stopping, in their haste to go elsewhere.

On the square of the ball-game, people are beginning to arrive from
everywhere, from the village itself and from the neighboring hamlets,
from the huts of the shepherds or of the smugglers who perch above,
on the harsh mountains. Hundreds of Basque caps, all similar, are now
reunited, ready to judge the players, to applaud or to murmur; they
discuss the chances, comment upon the relative strength of the players
and make big bets of money. And young girls, young women gather also,
having nothing of the awkwardness of the peasants in other provinces of
France, elegant, refined, graceful in costumes of the new fashions;
some wearing on their hair the silk kerchief, rolled and arranged like
a small cap; others bareheaded, their hair dressed in the most
modern manner; most of them pretty, with admirable eyes and very long
eyebrows--This square, always solemn and ordinarily somewhat sad, is
filled to-day, Sunday, with a lively and gay crowd.

The most insignificant hamlet in the Basque country has a square for
the ball-game, large, carefully kept, in general near the church, under
oaks.

But here, this is a central point and something like the Conservatory of
French ball-players, of those who become celebrated, in South America
as well as in the Pyrenees, and who, in the great international games,
oppose the champions of Spain. So the place is particularly beautiful
and pompous, surprising in so distant a village. It is paved with large
stones, between which grass grows expressing its antiquity and giving
to it an air of being abandoned. On the two sides are extended, for the
spectators, long benches--made of the red granite of the neighboring
mountain and, at this moment, all overgrown with autumn scabwort.

And in the back, the old monumental wall rises, against which the balls
will strike. It has a rounded front which seems to be the silhouette
of a dome and bears this inscription, half effac