is lost in the night of time. Their language -on which the late Prince Lucien Bonaparte made himself a foremost authorityhas no affiliations with any other. This language is still in current use, and even in literary use. I brought home a grammar and some specimens of a good literary periodical in this tongue, but philological details are hardly in order here. As to the sound of it, the novelist, Perez Galdós, says they think it very smooth, but what it really resembles is the rasping of a saw. Observe that it is not I who have the hardihood to offer this bold opinion. The people formerly had many important rights and exemptions, their famous fueros, which have been taken away from them in consequence of their fre

quent Carlist rebellions. Carlism means, of course, devotion to the wandering claimant, Don Carlos, who thinks he ought to have the throne because there was an alleged informality in the will of Ferdinand VII., in 1827. The Basques are so persistent in this cause that it has been said of them that they would be Carlists even if there were no Don Carlos. The Queen Regent, however, has done a shrewd thing in coming to make her summer home among them, and all her personal popularity, as well as their own self-interest, will now tend to abate this ancient prejudice.

sive courts. The sport is spreading throughout the Spanish-American world, and I wish it might spread to our part of America as well. I have heard an enthusiastic athlete call it an ideal substitute for foot-ball. The ball is struck with a long, curving, wickerwork handpiece, and is hurled to great distances, echoing hollowly amid the high walls. It is the only public diversion, we are told, that the Queen Regent attends. She sometimes takes King Alfonso to it,

They wear as a national headpiece, rich and poor alike, the boina, a sort of Tam-o'shanter, which you see also figuring as the military cap in the old illustrations of the Carlist wars. In particular they have a noble national sport, the game of pelota. This is played in a very high, massively built, stone court, with one side and two end walls, and the spectators placed on the other long side. There is not a Basque village without its fronton, one of these mas

the baby king, whose head we see on the Spanish postage stamps; and she does well, for it is a spectacle of manly strength and grace. She does not appear at the opera nor at balls, and she gives no countenance to the barbarous bull-fight. It is gratifying to know that she is sustained in the latter protest by at least a few other persons of high station and merit.

I was surprised to find one of the sights of the Spanish Newport to be an American college. This is the Instituto Internacional, of the Rev. Mr. Gulick, an outgrowth of mission work in Spain of some thirty years. I fancy this appeal to the intellectual shrewdness of the proud Spanish character, in a practical way, may be called to a more immediate success than direct attack upon their theological convictions. The school is intended for young Spanish girls. Some of these had just been taking the bachelor degree, at the public examinations, at the University of Madrid, with such extraordinary honors as to have made something of a sensation wherever it was known. The pupils, in their simple blue uniform, were trim, well-mannered, and most intelligent about their studies, and offered a sight very pleasant to see. The school is a little centre of fresh and independent thought, in a region much too strongly wedded to fixed ideas. It is bad

delighted throngs, who shriek and flee in terror before them, and then close up again as soon as they have passed. It is as if Moloch and his demons had broken loose, to run up and down in the earth. The terrace of the Casino is packed at the same time with people, dining, earlier in the evening, or sipping infinitesimal ices later. Their elegance forms a strong contrast to the humbler populace clustered around the music-stand, just without the light barriers. A certain young artillery officer, in the heyday of his life and spirits, and in a very handsome uniform, light blue and silver, used to do more for me than anybody else I met him at a tertulia, a reception-in pointing out who people were. There, sure enough, is Castelar, small and frail, but a weak frame now to contain his great powers and wide reputation. But there, too, is another little man, much more surrounded. It is the bull-fighter Guerrita, in the short, Mexican-looking jacket those of his craft affect in their private life, which is never private, chatting at his ease in a circle of high-born dames.

In the gaming-room, playing at roulette

"Tuxedo," but which in France and elsewhere, by neat adaptation from the English, is simply a "smoking." Like the soldiers they are small men, so often shorter than their fair partners as to be worthy of remark. The floor of the beautiful ball-room reflects like clear water all the lights, colors, flowers, and pretty women, the hedges of cosmopolitan spectators shutting them in, and the other hedges of spectators in the fine boxes above. All the elegantissimas muchachas and magnificos jóvenes, as the newspapers say, "the most elegant belles and magnificent beaux," are assembled. For the rest they conduct their cotillion much as it might be done at a Patriarchs' ball in New York, or even at a Yale Junior "Prom" in New Haven. Why, indeed, should they not? It is they who invented all the details of a luxurious state of civilization, and we do but follow them.

wear to that stupid and monotonous spectacle of butchery the old national costume —a very bright gown, with mantilla and fan which is otherwise disappearing. The villainous diversion is as strongly entrenched as ever; there are no signs of its abatement. I had to go again to see Guerrita and Mazzantini, and, of course, to see the Señoritas Toreras also, in order to make these sage reflections. On the whole, one thinks he will have to give the Spanish race up, the enigma is too great. How can they be so amiable and taking in most other ways?

Another custom of theirs we should do well to adopt. They go and take their daily walk openly, and make full and free profession of it, whereas Anglo-Saxons treat it as if it were something to be half ashamed of, and affect an errand as a pretext for being seen abroad. They all walk, too, in the same place, some pleasant stretch of boulevard or garden; they pass and re-pass; friends know they shall find one another there, and they stop and chat or pace on together. Young girls, even those of the pretty school-girl age, with their hair down their backs in a braid or in tresses, walk together in twos and threes. No one speaks to them; no one molests them; every objectionable element is kept apart; there is nothing to make them afraid. Some elder member of the family, of course, is about with a general eye on them. It is all very charming, there is a pleasant intimacy, a certain friendly and homelike feeling about it, as if all the town were not much more than one large family. What American city will first give us a paseo? and who will inaugurate it and make it popular?

As there is in the book-shops no good plan of San Sebastian, you are really obliged, in order to see what it is, to climb one of the mountains, of a thousand feet or so, that, like horns of dominion, guard it on either hand. How great are the rewards, on every account, when you get there. You see now that the town lies on a narrow neck of land, terminated, seaward, by Mount Urgull and its ancient fortress, and having on one side a large river, and on the other a delightful bay. That fortress is the one that the English took from the French, in 1813, after a struggle so desperate that it cost the destruction of the town as well.'

At sunset its shadow falls precisely over that part of the town which was once all there was of it-up to 1863, when the walls were razed—as if it still asserted thus, symbolically, its old mediæval jurisdiction. The line of the land wall was exactly that of the new Bulevar, which passes straight across the narrow neck, and idlers at the Café de la Marina may perhaps, in their pensive moments, have a vision of the combatants fighting along the battlemented walls, and pouring down arrows, melted lead, and boiling oil, just where the promenaders are now going up and down, under the gay electric lights. On the fortress-slopes are the lonely graves of some English officers who fell in the assault. The view out, over illimitable blue reaches of the Bay of Biscay, and the panorama of the town within, are both simply exquisite.

In the way of excursions the visitor must go to the outlying villages of Hernani, Passajes, Rentería, and Lezo, and to Fuenterrabía, just at the French frontier. In all of these places he will see grave peasants drinking cider in dusky, Rembrandtish interiors; and many poor old houses, with rich escutcheons, all that is left of what was once grandeur but was never comfort. At the small port of Passajes, Breton de los Herreros thought good to lay the scene of one of his comedies, in the early part of this century, and, later, Palacio Valdés that of a part of his novel of "Riverita." An American memory connected with it is that Lafayette sailed away from there when he was obliged to escape from France by stealth, to come and help us about our independence.

I have called San Sebastian the Spanish Newport, but in respect to bathing it is more like Narragansett Pier. Everybody bathes; it is the custom. The beach is gay, but not in consequence of the bathing costumes. These are homely, clumsy garments, adapted to a purely hygienic dip. You see nothing of that extraordinary feminine garb, houri-like and nymphlike, that clever draughtsmen delight to draw for the comic papers. Those fantastic conceits are what the imaginations of unregenerate men might like to have exist, but they do not exist; they are nowhere to be found along these coasts, nor even in madcap France.

The fine, smooth beach, because of pos