sort of far-off warning to man, a little more durable, who resists
several winters and lets himself be lured several times by the charm of
spring. Man, in the rainy nights of October and of November, feels
especially the instinctive desire to seek shelter at home, to warm
himself at the hearth, under the roof which so many thousand years
amassed have taught him progressively to build.--And Ramuntcho felt
awakening in the depths of his being the old ancestral aspirations for
the Basque home of the country, the isolated home, unattached to the
neighboring homes. He hastened his steps the more toward the primitive
dwelling where his mother was waiting for him.

Here and there, one perceived them in the distance, indistinct in the
twilight, the Basque houses, very distant from one another, dots white or
grayish, now in the depth of some gorge steeped in darkness, then on some
ledge of the mountains with summits lost in the obscure sky. Almost
inconsequential are these human habitations, in the immense and confused
entirety of things; inconsequential and even annihilated quite, at this
hour, before the majesty of the solitude and of the eternal forest
nature.

Ramuntcho ascended rapidly, lithe, bold and young, still a child, likely
to play on his road as little mountaineers play, with a rock, a reed, or
a twig that one whittles while walking. The air was growing sharper, the
environment harsher, and already he ceased to hear the cries of the
curlews, their rusty-pulley cries, on the rivers beneath. But Ramuntcho
was singing one of those plaintive songs of the olden time, which are
still transmitted in the depths of the distant lands, and his naive voice
went through the mist or the rain, among the wet branches of the oaks,
under the grand shroud, more and more sombre, of isolation, of autumn and
of night.