a simple
Basque mountaineer, sixteen or seventeen years old, formed like a man,
but retaining the ignorance and the candor of a little boy.

Soon he perceived Etchezar, his parish, its belfry massive as the
dungeon of a fortress; near the church, some houses were grouped;
others, more numerous, had preferred to be disseminated in the
surroundings, among trees, in ravines or on bluffs. The night fell
entirely, hastily that evening, because of the sombre veils hooked to
the great summits.

Around this village, above or in the valleys, the Basque country
appeared, at that moment, like a confusion of gigantic, obscure masses.
Long mists disarranged the perspectives; all the distances, all the
depths had become inappreciable, the changing mountains seemed to have
grown taller in the nebulous phantasmagoria of night. The hour, one knew
not why, became strangely solemn, as if the shade of past centuries
was to come out of the soil. On the vast lifting-up which is called the
Pyrenees, one felt something soaring which was, perhaps, the finishing
mind of that race, the fragments of which have been preserved and to
which Ramuntcho belonged by his mother--

And the child, composed of two essences so diverse, who was walking
alone toward his dwelling, through the night and the rain, began again
in the depth of his double being to feel the anxiety of inexplicable
reminiscences.

At last he arrived in front of his house,--which was very elevated, in
the Basque fashion, with old wooden balconies under narrow windows, the
glass of which threw into the night the light of a lamp. As he came
near the entrance, the light noise of his walk became feebler in the
thickness of the dead leaves: the leaves of those plane-trees shaped
like vaults which, according to the usage of the land, form a sort of
atrium before each dwelling.

She recognized from afar the steps of her son, the serious Franchita,
pale and straight in her black clothes,--the one who formerly had loved
and followed the stranger; then, who, feeling her desertion approaching,
had returned courageously to the village in order to inhabit alone the
dilapidated house of her deceased parents. Rather than to live in the
vast city, and to be troublesome and a solicitor there, she had quickly
resolved to depart, to renounce everything, to make a simple Basque
peasant of that little Ramuntcho, who, at his entrance in life, had worn
gowns embroidered in white silk.

It was fifteen