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creditable career lay before him. He was a lance-corporal. His wife was a good creature, but homely. She was on the strength of the regiment,' and took in washing. But she had a tongue like the east wind, and, her husband's emoluments not being large, she objected to money being spent out of the family.

Brother Tom applied himself with increased energy to testing the effects of alcohol on the animal economy.

One autumn evening Maisie stood in the roar of the Strand, almost stupid with exhaustion and feeling the keen wind acutely. She had no underclothing to speak of, and was too faint to feel very hungry. Had she stood there five minutes previously, she would have met Mr. and Mrs. Brown.

The last time I saw Dolly, she was in the act of alighting from a victoria in the Brompton Road. She had a bright complexion, and vouchsafed me a gracious nod and smile. Certainly she is a piquante little thing, and has, I believe, a good many admirers.

Perhaps, if poor Cookham Dene had not craved for appreciation, and if he could have refrained from worrying his wife to death, a good many of the incidents that I have had to record might not have happened.

67

ST. JEAN DE LUZ.

THE ups and downs of the world often bring about great changes in the relative positions both of persons and places, and this is strikingly illustrated in the histories of the little town of St. Jean de Luz and its brilliant parvenu neighbour Biarritz.

Time was when Biarritz was a poor little fishing hamlet lying in a waste of wind-blown sandhills-the world forgetting, and by the world forgot. It lay some two miles off the great highway to Spain, and was unknown even by name to the kings and ministers and great lords and generals who ever and anon passed like splendid comets on their way to or from the frontier.

St. Jean de Luz was where they halted to break their journey. It was ten miles nearer the Spanish frontier, and was then a town of considerable importance, both on account of its size, its trade, and from being the most advanced outpost of France.

In the Middle Ages it had a population of 10,000—not altogether given to orthodoxy, it would seem, for no less than five hundred persons were here put to death for the crime of sorcery towards the end of the sixteenth century. Perhaps the presence of a large colony of Gitanos had something to do with this unholy tendency. They were a people known to be loose in their religious ideas, and more than suspected of having direct dealings with the Evil One. It was, indeed, widely believed that they never died. It was said that no dead gipsy nor yet any gipsy's grave had ever been seen. The mere suspicion of this unhallowed immunity from death was reason enough for hating them, as it is only human nature to hate anybody who differs from his fellow-men.

The authorities were much disquieted by this belief, and they even captured and imprisoned certain aged gipsies to see whether or no they would die. The misery of the poor creatures was excessive when they understood for what object they were confined. Some, it is said, on being released, immediately disappeared, but none were ever known to die.

Their marriage customs, too, were heathenish and singular: the betrothed couple went before the chief of their tribe, and in his presence dashed an earthen vessel on the ground. The chief

then counted the potsherds and pronounced the couple man and wife for as many years as there were pieces.

It is plain that the duration of such marriages must have depended greatly on the amount of energy Love lent to the bridegroom's arm.

St. Jean de Luz is a sunny little town situated on a large land-bound bay, and is interesting both by reason of its grievous misfortunes and its departed glory. In the heyday of its prosperity it was able to equip a fleet of forty whaling boats, in which its fearless fishermen pursued leviathan even to the coasts of Iceland and Newfoundland, long before the days when Columbus discovered the New World or fishery treaties were thought of. They claim to have been the inventors of the harpoon, for which the whales at least owe them no thanks.

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The crowning glory, however, of the little town was in its being selected by Louis XIV. as the scene of his marriage with Maria-Theresa, the Infanta of Spain, which was celebrated with the greatest possible magnificence in 1660. So deeply did the town appreciate the tremendous honour done to it, that the door by which the Grand Monarque left the church was promptly bricked up, that its threshold might never be profaned by any foot less worshipful.

St. Jean de Luz is a pure Basque town, and the church, though built by the English during the 300 years that they occupied Guienne and Gascony, is a fine example of Basque architecture. The tower is quaint and squat, with two short diminishing octagon stories. There are three tiers of galleries running round the interior of the church, according to Basque custom, which assigns them to the use of the men, while the floor of the nave is given up to the women. The roof is painted blue and besprinkled with gold stars, while the choir is rich with carving and gilding relieved against a deep red background.

The Château Louis XIV., in which the King and his bride remained some weeks, is a small unpretentious building with four airy little tourelles jutting out mysteriously from fan-shaped brackets which seem to provide very inadequate support. On the southern side are three deep shadowy verandahs, romantic and Moorish, well suited for lovers' meetings. The ground floor is now used as a café; the principal room is extremely low, and made to appear still lower by the immense beams which cross the ceiling. Not many years ago a curious old painting representing the

marriage of the King hung outside the house, but it is no longer there.

A bowshot from the château is the house in which the Infanta took up her brief abode previous to her marriage, and another house is pointed out as the one in which Mazarin twice slept, once on his way to the Ile de Conférence, to conclude the famous Treaty of the Pyrenees with the Spaniards in 1657, and again when he arranged the marriage of the King with the Infanta.

Here too Wellington fixed his head quarters during the winter of 1813-14, and the whole surrounding country has been one vast battle-field. The grand sombre mass of La Rhune, at whose feet St. Jean seems to lie, is a monument marking the burial-place of many of our soldiers. Its heights were occupied by the French, and were taken by our troops after severe fighting and heavy loss, as can well be imagined by anyone who has ever toiled up its steep bare sides.

La Rhune disputes with Bayonne the distinction of having been the place where the bayonnette was first used; the tradition runs that in a battle with the Spaniards, the Basques' ammunition having run short, they fastened their tremendous knives on to the muzzles of their guns and thus invented the bayonet. It is true that the name supports the rival claim, but names are often veritable will-o'-the-wisps, and will lead the unwary into a slough of error. Is it not popularly believed that Bath bricks comes from Bath, even as Bath buns do; and that the Bridgwater Canal is connected with the town of Bridgwater? And yet both these beliefs are erroneous-as erroneous as the equally common one that Bright's disease was so named from being a malady our great Quaker statesman suffered from.

The misfortunes which from time to time have overwhelmed St. Jean de Luz have been due partly to man-it having twice been cruelly sacked by the Spaniards-but chiefly to the malevolence of the ocean. In 1675 it was almost wiped out by the sea, and since then has been partially destroyed so frequently that its population sank at one time as low as 2,000, and its trade was wholly ruined. Hitherto all the efforts of the best engineers have had no more than temporary success. A splendid granite breakwater constructed by Louis XVI. was utterly destroyed during a hurricane towards the end of last century.

Then in 1819 a cyclopean wall of masonry, fifty feet wide and thirty feet high, was raised like a fortification between the town

and the sea. But Poseidon resented this puny defiance, and, rising in his might, destroyed it in 1822, so totally as not to leave one stone upon another, and the engineers sent to report upon it were constrained to admit that not a fragment remained.

Undeterred by all these failures, the present Government has since been constructing a huge breakwater, projecting from the fort of Socoa, which commands the entrance to the harbour, and the work of piling together the gigantic blocks of concrete still goes on steadily, if slowly. It may be destined to succeed where other attempts have failed; but so tremendous is the force of the Atlantic rollers on this coast, that it is questionable if any work of human hands can resist it successfully. Napoleon's breakwater at Biarritz was built with square concrete blocks weighing forty tons apiece. But it was soon destroyed, and the blocks were rolled about like pebbles in the tremendous surf. During a storm in 1868 one of them was carried completely over the pier, as if it had been a cork, though the pier is 22 feet above low-water mark.

I believe that engineers are of opinion that nothing can ultimately save St. Jean de Luz, and that it is only a question of a hundred or two hundred years before the town is swallowed up by the greedy ocean.

The drive of ten miles from Biarritz to St. Jean is a very charming one, with the tumbling surf-fringed sea on one hand, and the jagged outline of the Pyrenean range on the other, rising blue and majestic beyond the broken wooded foreground. The country of the Basques is entered at Bidart, a village on the cliff, with all the Basque characteristics well marked. Its red and white houses-each with the short side of its unequal gabled roof to the sunny south, and the long side extending protectingly to the north-are scattered at random by ones or twos on the hillside without any approach to a row or a street. Each is sturdily independent, and all look comfortable, neat, and well-to-do.

Voltaire jestingly described the Basques as 'un petit peuple qui saute et danse sur les Pyrénées.' They are, in truth, a cheerful, light-hearted race, much given to dancing, and yet more to tennis-playing, which latter amusement is an absolute passion with them. A Basque baby asks for no toys but a ball and a wall, for no sooner can he toddle than he begins to play Fives. No wall is held sacred, and though every village has its Fivescourt, it is necessary to put notices on church walls, and other

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