family tree which remarked, in a marginal note only midway back, that
"about this time the Creation took place."

They are not stilted in their pride, however; your true Basque cares
much for his descent and little for its dignities. "Where the McGregor
sits," he would affirm, "there is the head of the table," and so he
cares nothing about the nominal headship. He lives a free, busy life in
the hill-country or near the sea, stalwart, swarthy, a lover of the open
air, apt at work and sufficiently enterprising, self-respecting, "proud
as Lucifer and combustible as his matches," in no case pinchingly poor,
but rarely rich, and never in awe of his own coat-of-arms.

Writers uniformly take a wicked pleasure in maligning the Basque
language. Its spelling and syntax, its words and sentences, its methods
of construction, are openly derided. Unusual word-forms and distended
proper names are singled out and held up to jeers and contumely. A
Spanish proverb asserts that as to pronunciation the Basques write
"Solomon" and pronounce it "Nebuchadnezzar." The devil, it is alleged,
studied for seven years to learn the Basque tongue; at the end of that
time he had mastered only three words and abandoned the task in disgust.
"And the result is," adds a vivacious writer, "that he is unable to
tempt a Basque, because he cannot speak to him, and that consequently
every Basque goes straight to heaven. Unfortunately, now that the
population is beginning to talk French, (which the devil knows terribly
well,) this privilege is disappearing."

Overhearing disjointed Basque phrases on the Biarritz beach or here in
the streets and cafés of St. Jean, one will not blame the devil's
discouragement. There is scarcely one familiar Aryan syllable. For
centuries their speech was not even a written one; there is said to be