keep all of you under His protection; it is now half past three, and I
imagine you have just got up from table and are sitting in the front
hall at your coffee, if the sun permits. The sun is probably not so
scalding there as it is here, but it doesn't do me any harm, and I am
feeling splendidly well. The route from Bayonne here is glorious; on
the left the Pyrenees, something like the Dent du Midi and Moléson,
which, however, are here called "Pie" and "Port," in shifting
Alpine panorama, on the right the shores of the sea, like those at
Genoa. The change in entering Spain is surprising; at Behobie, the
last place in France, one could easily believe one's self still on the
Loire; in Fuentarabia a steep street twelve feet wide, every window
with balcony and curtain, every balcony with black eyes and mantillas,
beauty and dirt; at the market-place drums and fifes, and some
hundreds of women, old and young, dancing a fandango, while the men in
their drapery looked on, smoking. Thus far the country is
exceptionally beautiful--green valleys and wooded slopes, with
fantastic lines of fortifications above them, row after row; inlets of
the sea, with very narrow entrances, which cut deep into the land,
like Salzburg lakes in mountain basins. I look down on such a one from
my window, separated from the sea by an island of rocks, set in a
steep frame of mountains with woods and houses, below to the left city
and harbor. My old friend Galen, who is taking the baths here, with
wife and son, received me most warmly; I bathed with him at ten, and
after breakfast we walked, or, rather, crawled, through the heat up to
the citadel, and sat for a long time on a bench there, the sea a
hundred feet below us, near us a heavy fortress-battery, with a
singing sentry. This hill or rock would be an island did not a low
tongue of land connect it with the mainland. This tongue of land
separates two inlets from each other, so you get towards the north a
distant view of the sea from the citadel, towards the east and west a