Northern thorns leaning with knotted elbows on the downs. Yet they had the strength of the oak and the grace which he in his old age lacks. It is curious that the olives, the tree of fruit and life, should belong to the old maid, Minerva; and that the tree named from the birthplace of Venus should be used to give the cachet of respectability to cemeteries, civilization in its most Christian aspect. We did not long consider the olives, for before us in the sun lay Canigou, clouds on his shoulders, but his white summits dancing in the sunlight, a sign for mariners a hundred miles away. After this we rarely left the presence of that mountain, which stands guardian over the easternmost Pyrenees. There are fellow peaks, who jostle behind, whose stature is greater; but, for all that, try as they may, they cannot see over his shoulder seaward or to the northern plains. Often his nine thousand and odd feet were hidden from trunk to head in clouds, but henceforward we all felt him about us as a child feels the presence of a bogey with which his nurse has threatened him.

So with Canigou before we took the road lightly, past the foot-hill villages, where the main road never comes and where the people find travellers such a rarity that they treat them, for want of a code, like their neighbors.

Each of these villages lay at the mouth of a valley. Each valley had a hamlet caught somewhere in its folds, and higher, nearer the heads a few crofters and goatherd cottages, where the last traces of road ended. If any one reading this is a gypsy, too, he will understand the power of will needed to pass these valley mouths, where so much might lie hidden under the cols to Spain, where the clouds were hanging-the curé and the mountain folk, clear-voiced goatherds, quaint festivals, and corners high among the rocks, with a bed of columbine to rest on.

But we held to our purpose bravely, and left the road where it wound through the cork and thymot that grew where the cropland ended. We crossed the fields till we came to a main road, where lay a village which could give us dejeuner without delay. We found an auberge whose hospitality was Rabelaisian. We were told: "Buvez bien, mangez bien." We

did both, and took the road to Ceret with a warmth without and within not wholly due to the sun on the white straight road. This it was, too, maybe that made us pitch our camp for an hour in the lupin with the fallen log of a holm-oak for a pillow, and the gray-green foliage of a cork grove for shade. The Tech and the wide valley lay between us and the blue hills; a bamboo brake hid us from the world and the air was alive with a sonorous murmur of early summer. So our songs trailed into the noise of the bees and we read a tale from that most whimsical book of fantasy, "The Starry Pool" (by Stephen Tallents, Liverpool, 1918). You whose Odysseys are not complete without your Stevenson and Keats, your "Gil Blas" and "Don Quixote," remember to find a corner of your rucksack for "The Starry Pool." Let him, too, who travels in the Pyrenees, take the "Song of Roland" and a gourd of wine, a taste for good adventure and high comradeship, and he will want no more than "quiet palmer."

I don't know whether between our reading and setting forth again there was an interval of sleep or day-dreams, but certain it was, when we had followed the Tech to Ceret, which stands where she leaves the hills, the sun was slanting between the peaks. We found an inn whose royal chamber, with two great beds, we chartered; and, leaving our packs behind, we trotted, so light were our unburdened backs, to the river. There, in a pool with a window rock for shelter, we removed the day's dirt and let the water flow over us. Its swift coolness was a promise for the morrow, when we would follow the Tech to where her waters began.

PRATS DE MOLLO

A man coming from "The Cursed Ranges' over the peak of the thirteen winds and turning east from the Sierra del Roc Negre will-but who am I to tell of a trail that only the smugglers know on the calmest starlight nights of summer? Whichever way the stranger comes, and whoever he be, pork packer or humble gypsy student, if he come by the Shepherds gate or the Portes of France or Spain, he will halt a moment in awe beneath the walls of the enchanted city. It

lies walled four-square above the river's gorge. The walls are double, their turrets and bastions climb the hill, where a secret passage leads to the citadel, perched eagle-like on the mountainside above. Its church, gorgeous within in carved barbaric gold of the high altar, stands over the huddled houses, to this day the last stronghold of the city. In token of which arrow-slitted breastworks gird the open-work pilasters of its tower, and heavy battlements encircle the built-up platform, where this ecclesiastical fortress stands. Here the kings of Aragon heard mass in their mountain fastness. The kings of Aragon took their crown only when their subjects had said: "We, who are as good as you, ask you to be our king." Prats de Mollo, the enchanted city, was once their summer capital. She stands, still untouched, a sentinel to Spain and France, but the kings of Aragon. A ravine which the walls fly in one span runs through this place of two thousand inhabitants. The Shepherds gate is at the bridge over the Tech, which tumbles fifty feet below the southern wall. There is one road only through the city. The upward streets are steps, the lengthwise streets are cobbled mule tracks. In the Place there is just room for a coach to turn round. In the Place, too, and on the southern side, is an auberge. Its rooms are wide and sunny, clean and garnished, and they lead on to a balcony, looking over the Tech and the mountains of the frontier beyond. The town itself stands on the instep of Canigou. There is a cracked piano in the room down-stairs where messieurs are served their dinners. And what dinners! But more of them later.

Here we decided to pitch our camp, and, in the enchantment of the moment, for life. The patron and patronne were honest folk with an eye to main chance. This time we decided to have the luxury of four beds. He is wise who chooses his bedfellow from one point of view-his immobility in sleep. That night I slept deeply and truly, a night the expert in quality of sleep looks back on and gives thanks to his Creator for.

We left our packs here and refused the *I have forgotten the full coronation formula for the House of Aragon, but that is its sense as nearly verbatim as I can remember.

offer of dejeuner whose fragrance floated up to the balcony. Buying sardines, oranges, and bread, we sallied out with fishing-rods, which two of us carried in lieu of walking-sticks. We found a pasture full of apple-trees in blossom, for it was spring in this mountain world. We lit a small fire under the rock and boiled some nauseating soup, advertised on the covering as hotchpotch. It was almost the only serious quarrel we had. with our digestions. After luncheon we tried our luck in the torrent, whose only pools were caldrons of boiling water in the rocks, and a series of rock dams where the irrigating ditches formed the steep strips of pasture which, with the goats and yoke-oxen, made these peoples' livelihood. We fished up and we fished down. But the infallible March brown drew no answer to our efforts. Not the Zulu black or blue-or hackled, nor all the known lore of mountain streams could lure a trout to our rods. To an English fisherman there is no humiliation so great as the inability to catch trout in foreign waters; and when the natives produce them for supper the same night the humiliation is almost intolerable. We walked home that evening small, small atoms on the surface of the universe.

But once back at the auberge and escaped from the unendurable sympathy of the patron and tales of miraculous catches, the spell of Prats came over us again. So we climbed to the church and lost ourselves in imaginings of the past, as we looked out over the infant city through the deep embrasures of its platform. And turning again we climbed to a bank of clover close to the citadel, where even the tower lay beneath us. For half an hour no one spoke, each holding his own thoughts and fashioning his own dreams.

Roofs five hundred years old, graygreen and rose, lay beneath, herded and huddled like sheep driven into the fold of the city walls. The smoke of evening meals drifted up from each roof as it had done since these roofs were built. Each separate noise of children's laughter, or a barking dog, came up to us-the song of men working late in the evening on a barn roof, a Catalan song of Aucassin and Nicolette, a boy calling to his goats

to bring them in, then the caravan of sure-footed, deep-uddered mountain-goats came winding down the track, a belled and bearded he-goat leading. Beyond this unchanging civilization which had worshipped the same God in the simplicity of a faith taught by missionaries of the decaying Roman Empire, lay the broken ranges, aloof to all faith or civilization; a brown treeless desert where the wind blows from Africa, from one desert to another across a third, the plateau of central Spain. The sun set behind the snow peaks at our back on the lonely ridges, for one moment changing it to flame and then to the deep purple of falling night.

Truly Prats de Mollo is a city of dreams set in mountains beyond time.

That night the landlord made us a feast of trout and rabbit and veal, artichokes and garlic, and a mighty pudding and goat's cheese, all washed down with flagons of good wine from the Roussillon, followed by a bottle of his most precious liqueur of Banyuls.

The cracked piano rocked and rang to the songs of our delight, till the village children gathered at the window to watch us these strange Frenchmen from another valley, filling the inn with their merriment. Then we went up-stairs and, on the balcony beneath the stars, sang "Annie Laurie" very softly under the roar of the Tech.

There was, too, a day of days on the Spanish marches. We left Prats in the morning, fishing-rod abandoned for a stout ground-ash, and sandals on our feet to grip the mountainside. We climbed the hill across the river, and as we did so met an old man with a train of mules from Spain, winding down the track to Prats, all the mule-bells jingling. We hailed him and passed the time of day, then left him and the trail and climbed straight up the hill to a ruined watchtower where we meant to eat our feast of bread and chocolate and butter. The way was full of strange flowers, the first flowers of winter-anemones, white and deep pink, dwarf winter-sweet among the wild box bushes, gentians and queer new saxifrages. As we climbed we snuffed the first breath of the wind from Spain and filled our lungs with it, and still we

climbed until a falcon, wheeling far below us, looked like a wren of prey.

At last we gained the tower. Its walls were so thick that the staircase, such as it was, for there was no foothold, lay completely inside the wall. The centre of the ceiling was a large hole, through which the smoke from the central hearth escaped. The broken stonework of the roof seemed to command the world. The whole great flank of Canigou, snowbound to his waist, the gaunt higher peaks behind him, the Pic du Geant and the Treize Vents. Far up and round the shoulder of a neighbor hill lay the col to Spain above the Tech's headwaters. East and north lay the desert to the sea, a vista of plains below Ceret which melted into low clouds on the sea.

We ate our feast in the manner solemn to such festivals, taking the gourd turn about and, between our eating in the fathom-deep doorway, looking out to the broken ranges and jagged peaks of rock. We read a tale from "The Starry Pool," then smoked in silence slow pipefuls of content.

Hiding our tracks, we started over the smooth uplands toward the frontier. We found on the summit of a hill a cave, man-size for ten feet, and after that you could hear a pebble tinkle far into the earth.

The heath, wind-swept and bare, with here and there a snow-drift, for we were five thousand feet above the sea, was starred with gentians so blue that they outdazzled the sky. Still toiling over the smooth slopes, we came at last to the summit and to Spain. There by a frontier cairn, leaning against the wind, we drank to the health of Spanish marches and Prats de Mollo, the gourd uptilted till no drop remained. Behind still lay the view that we left, and before lay Spain-valley, range, hill, and river, eastward to Barcelona and westward to Saragossa-a great dun world, with never a sign of human life, only its wind seemed to bring the savor of desert places and dusty streets. It had loitered in the courts of the Alhambra, heard mass in the cathedral of Seville, moaned over the Spanish capital till it gathered strength, roaring on the bleak plateaus for its last sweep upward to the border.

PEAKING in the House of Commons shortly after the tragic loss of the British submarine M-I, Lady Astor proposed the abolition of submarines as useless except in war. The same naïve truism could be applied to all types of naval vessels. Their military value is their only value, and those are most to be desired that will best fight the country's battles. That is the sole measure of their worth. For war, and for war alone, naval ships are designed, commissioned, operated for the short span of some twenty years, and, save for those whose historic hulks find resting-places as patriotic relics, pass to the junk-dealer at prices that would scarcely cover the cost of their humblest auxiliary machinery. The harbors of the world know them no more.

On the walls of navy offices hang the faded pictures of many forgotten ships, whose ward-rooms were once busy with the talk of boat-races and bright work, the approaching climax of admiral's inspection, the voyage out and the glad return, and, now and again, intruding as a subject of distant and foreign interest, war. Here too are the portraits of their commanders, the officers of other days, whose names have long since been dropped from the Retired List. They were much the same manner of men as we who serve to-day, these "old-timers," looking down from their pictures a little severely, owing perhaps to the necessity of a military expression, and the unwonted tightness of special full dress bought when they were very young midshipmen just out of the Naval Academy, with the great world still untravelled. Much the same too, if one consider fundamentals, were the ships they manned, the largest practical hulls with the greatest number of the most powerful guns, so placed as to bring

the maximum fire against the enemy. True, spars and sails gradually disappear, probably much to the regret of the conservative, weapons and hulls grow apace; suddenly the logic of all big guns, except for a light battery against torpedo-craft, strikes home in the dreadnaught design. Still bigger and more destructive battleships appear (the achievement of patient and kindly gentlemen in quiet Washington offices), pushing on in the quickening race, delicately balancing the ruin that might be wrought by ten fourteen-inch guns against twelve twelve-inch, guns against armor, armor against engines and speed, and all against the qualities necessary to sustain their ships in the probable area of the "next war." The same forces that gave birth to the automobile, rapid transit, great cities, the teeming life we owe to modern machine-made prosperity, gave us the dreadnaught and the superdreadnaught, symbols of the Frankenstein monster, modern armaments, created so unknowingly at first from vague beginnings.

The "Influence of Sea Power on History" was a new book when the navies of to-day were first taking shape, a scholar's patient search for the truth through long days of quiet study. Then one judges the marine orderly got but a short reply from Captain Mahan when the report was made of the noon position and "chronometers wound," while his ship loitered through the tropics with the trades astern, and, as scornfully described by an old exgunner, "with the 'Old Man' asittin' in his cabin alongside of a full-length picture of that 'limey' admiral Nelson and awritin' a book while me and the Boats'n ran the ship."

Then there were the Cowes Races, ships of all navies gathered for ceremonious visits, dancing on the quarter-deck, and, perchance, a whispered agreement between statesmen and admirals of "military commitments" over the evening