seemed to ring the annual half-death of the exhausted plants.

On the Pyrenean lands, all bushes and vast woods, the melancholy of the
rainy nights of declining seasons fell slowly, enveloping like a shroud,
while Ramuntcho walked on the moss-covered path, without noise, shod with
rope soles, supple and silent in his mountaineer's tread.

Ramuntcho was coming on foot from a very long distance, ascending the
regions neighboring the Bay of Biscay, toward his isolated house which
stood above, in a great deal of shade, near the Spanish frontier.

Around the solitary passer-by, who went up so quickly without trouble and
whose march in sandals was not heard, distances more and more profound
deepened on all sides, blended in twilight and mist.

The autumn, the autumn marked itself everywhere. The corn, herb of the
lowlands, so magnificently green in the Spring, displayed shades of dead
straw in the depths of the valleys, and, on all the summits, beeches and
oaks shed their leaves. The air was almost cold; an odorous humidity came
out of the mossy earth and, at times, there came from above a light
shower. One felt it near and anguishing, that season of clouds and of
long rains, which returns every time with the same air of bringing the
definitive exhaustion of saps and irremediable death,--but which passes
like all things and which one forgets at the following spring.

Everywhere, in the wet of the leaves strewing the earth, in the wet of
the herbs long and bent, there was a sadness of death, a dumb resignation
to fecund decomposition.

But the autumn, when it comes to put an end to the plants, brings only a