grown taller in the nebulous phantasmagoria of night. The hour, one knew
not why, became strangely solemn, as if the shade of past centuries was
to come out of the soil. On the vast lifting-up which is called the
Pyrenees, one felt something soaring which was, perhaps, the finishing
mind of that race, the fragments of which have been preserved and to
which Ramuntcho belonged by his mother--

And the child, composed of two essences so diverse, who was walking alone
toward his dwelling, through the night and the rain, began again in the
depth of his double being to feel the anxiety of inexplicable
reminiscences.

At last he arrived in front of his house,--which was very elevated, in
the Basque fashion, with old wooden balconies under narrow windows, the
glass of which threw into the night the light of a lamp. As he came near
the entrance, the light noise of his walk became feebler in the thickness
of the dead leaves: the leaves of those plane-trees shaped like vaults
which, according to the usage of the land, form a sort of atrium before
each dwelling.

She recognized from afar the steps of her son, the serious Franchita,
pale and straight in her black clothes,--the one who formerly had loved
and followed the stranger; then, who, feeling her desertion approaching,
had returned courageously to the village in order to inhabit alone the
dilapidated house of her deceased parents. Rather than to live in the
vast city, and to be troublesome and a solicitor there, she had quickly
resolved to depart, to renounce everything, to make a simple Basque
peasant of that little Ramuntcho, who, at his entrance in life, had worn
gowns embroidered in white silk.