abounds in San Sebastian, but we saw no signs of the high temper which
is said to go with it. This, indeed, was known to me chiefly from my
first reading in _Don Quixote,_ of the terrific combat between the
squire of the Biscayan ladies whose carriage the knight of La Mancha
stopped after his engagement with the windmills. In their exchange of
insults incident to the knight's desire that the ladies should go to
Toboso and thank Dulcinea for his delivery of them from the necromancers
he had put to flight in the persons of two Benedictine monks, "'Get
gone,' the squire called, in bad Spanish and worse Biscayan, 'Get gone,
thou knight, and Devil go with thou; or by He Who me create . . . me
kill thee now so sure as me be Biscayan,'" and when the knight called
him an "inconsiderable mortal," and said that if he were a gentleman he
would chastise him: "'What! me no gentleman?' replied the Biscayan. 'I
swear thou be liar as me be Christian. . . . Me will show thee me be
Biscayan, and gentleman by land, gentleman by sea, gentleman in spite of
Devil; and thou lie if thou say the contrary.'"

It is a scene which will have lived in the memory of every reader, and I
recurred to it hopefully but vainly in San Sebastian, where this fiery
threefold gentleman might have lived in his time. It would be
interesting to know how far the Basques speak broken Spanish in a
fashion of their own, which Cervantes tried to represent in the talk of
his Biscayan. Like the Welsh again they strenuously keep their
immemorial language against the inroads of the neighboring speech. How
much they fix it in a modern literature it would be easier to ask than
to say. I suppose there must be Basque newspapers; perhaps there are
Basque novelists, there are notoriously Basque bards who recite their
verses to the peasants, and doubtless there are poets who print their
rhymes: and I blame myself for not inquiring further concerning them of
that kindly Basque banker who wished so much to do something for me in