He stopped for an instant, pensive, to see a cart drawn by oxen pass at a
great distance above him. The cowboy who drove the slow team sang also;
through a bad and rocky path, they descended into a ravine bathed in
shadows already nocturnal.

And soon they disappeared in a turn of the path, masked suddenly by
trees, as if they had vanished in an abyss. Then Ramuntcho felt the grasp
of an unexpected melancholy, unexplained like most of his complex
impressions, and, with an habitual gesture, while he resumed his less
alert march, he brought down like a visor on his gray eyes, very sharp
and very soft, the crown of his woolen Basque cap.

Why?--What had to do with him this cart, this singing cowboy whom he did
not even know? Evidently nothing--and yet, for having seen them disappear
into a lodging, as they did doubtless every night, into some farm
isolated in a lowland, a more exact realization had come to him of the
humble life of the peasant, attached to the soil and to the native field,
of those human lives as destitute of joy as beasts of burden, but with
declines more prolonged and more lamentable. And, at the same time,
through his mind had passed the intuitive anxiety for other places, for
the thousand other things that one may see or do in this world and which
one may enjoy; a chaos of troubling half thoughts, of atavic
reminiscences and of phantoms had furtively marked themselves in the
depths of his savage child's mind--

For Ramuntcho was a mixture of two races very different and of two beings
separated, if one may say it, by an abyss of several generations. Created
by the sad fantasy of one of the refined personages of our dazzled epoch,
he had been inscribed at his birth as the "son of an unknown father" and