latter had done well in those ten years and was a banker in Montclair. He had been told to meet his brother at the old cave where they used to camp as boys. What Jim didn't tell Peter was this. Jim had decided it on the way up. He would give Peter his clothes and stay in the mountains. He knew, as Peter didn't, that the escape would be front-page stuff the next morning, that his relationship would be known to every newspaper reader, that he would be exposed and ruined by it. He had a curious mixture of thoughts. Dislike of being the ruined Valjean of a respectable suburb was confused with a long-suppressed desire to be a Thoreau. He would build a cabin with his own hands up there in the isolated mountains. He was sufficiently selfish to want an excuse for deserting a home in the suburbs, a balky furnace, a wife and two children, with all the details they involved, in favor of a look at the moon across a mountain-top, a diet of raw vegetables, and the right not to shave. He had always wanted to live alone as a squatter in the deserted hills. But he wanted his brother to believe that he was sacrificing an assured position, a respectable social environment and the comforts of life, as some sort of recompense to the brother who had kept his mouth shut for ten years. So when the prison clothes had been

burned, the chain filed off, he made modest mention of it, but it is doubtful if Peter heard him. He was far more interested in making what reporters persist in calling "his getaway." Which he did in a few moments walking down the hill sideways in the manner of a crab, pausing to wave at the turn in the trail. Jim Barnes then took from the bag and put on an old flannel shirt and khaki trousers, lighted his pipe and looked off over the hills. He was content.

A few hours later came the dawn, almost as quickly as it did at the Hollywood Vaudeville on Tuesday nights. Jim rolled out of his blanket, bathed his face in the cold brook and realized with a happy thrill that the first day of his new life was actually his to do with as he wished. He turned from the brook to walk back to the cave of his boyhood memories. Then he stopped suddenly. A large sign in shiniest A & P red was creaking gently in the morning breeze. It bore this simple message:

CAVE OF THE WINDS Hamburgers, Waffles, Hot Coneys Clam Chowder OPENS MAY 15TH

THE PLAINS AND THE SEA ROAD TO SPAIN

22

OUR men were leaning over the bow of the packet from Havre, singing "Annie Laurie softly into the night. They sang so softly that a yard away the waves drowned their song, and no one heard their singing but themselves. It was the last night of three weeks in which that peculiar rite was consecrated. To-morrow they would be scattered, but to-night, with the sea in their faces and three weeks of joyous vagabondage fresh in their minds, it was meet that they should sing their song.

The first night it had been sung was under the Avenue des Platanes, in the ancient capital of the Kings of Majorca. All day had been spent on the skirt of the sea and the mountain. We had (for it is simpler that I should confess to "we" at once) gone to Argeles, a tiny town gathered round its tall church tower, huddled on one side from the sea, and on the west from the vineyards and cork groves that ran from there in long lines to the mountain whose blue feet were all that the clouds would let us see. Once, for a dazzling moment, the clouds had parted high up, and we had caught a sight of Canigou's snow peaks, standing over us with the sunlight playing in every color of the rainbow on her. But only for one precious second. At Argeles we found an auberge and a dejeuner of gigantic proportions savory garlic, and a collation of the strongest fish that ever came out of the Mediterranean, washed down by the soft red vin du pays, which is not the least of the Roussillon's blessings.

Replete and hiccoughishly benign, we

took up our sticks and found the sea road that leads to Spain. A few miles of song (for however tuneless some of us might be, the will to sing is the spirit of the Pyrenees) brought us to the first fingers of the mountain, where they trailed lazily into the sea. Here we found wild lavender beginning to catch our knees, as we left the road and started to run through a cork grove down toward the sea. The smell of the wild lavender, and the sheets of their purple flowers in the sunlight through cork leaves, once sniffed and seen, will not easily leave you. We came out on the edge of the cliff, where it first turns into a headland, in token of mountainhood. The wild lavender became stunted and sparse, and instead grew thyme and sea-pink and strange saxifrages that drowned the smell of the sea fifty feet beneath us. It lay calm and blue, as the very sky above it; here and there with a faint wisp of mist coiled lazily on the surface. Far beyond, out against Majorca, under the horizon, stood a piled city of clouds in the sunlight. Just at our feet was a tiny cove with a shingle beach and brown pools groined in the rocks. So we scrambled down the little cliff, deliriously each chose a rock for his clothes, left them there, and then shivered, waiting for the next man to take the first reckless step. It was April, and the sky was warm-we were not quite so sure of the sea. Being cowards, we lined up and let no man stay behind to mock. That bath was an unforgotten glory. If you can imagine an eighteenhour rumble, second-class, in anything but a train de luxe, and a night of incredible stuffiness in an inside room of a hotel, with washing materials too primitive to belong to anything but a front-line dugout-if you can feel the first joy in the freedom of the roads after laborious

sadly, but with a wealth of energy, we climbed out over the rim of our cove and left it to the goblins. Once more on the sea road to Spain we sang to the next village, greeting the muleteers who passed and always getting a jest in answer; for he who travels light of purse and heart can always buy good-fellowship.

From the village, whose red roofs climbed up from the bay, we took the train back to the one-time capital of the Kings of Majorca. A "Bock," complete well-being, and the Catalan company of our neighbors in the third-class compartment of the "train d'omnibus" crowned the day's journey.

That evening we cleaned the dust from our shoes and faces and went to the market to buy our provisions for the hills.

friendliest folk in foreign towns) where one might dine as befitted a famous day's voyaging and Easter eve in a FrancoMoorish town. He told us the Lion d'Or, down a labyrinth of streets behind the Spanish market, with a lucidity that even our northern ears could not but understand.

The Lion d'Or was worthy of its promise, and the dark, narrow streets that led to it. We made a famous meal, but wounded the "patron" deeply by debating on the wine-list with gourmet relish and ordering Bock like any simple Teutons. We appeased him, however, by taking our coffee with a glass of his most cherished "Fine."

After dinner we took another street as narrow as its fellows, more to explore the town at random than of set purpose. It

to the singers. They stood in a circle, those singers, with red Catalan caps on their heads and the lights of the brilliant

of Easter, which they had learned from their fathers and would teach to their children. Some were low and wistful,

mostly mountain songs with the sorrow of mountain people in their melody. But the last was a glad song, with a joyous swing in the tune, a true herald of Easter morning. It was when their singing was over that we walked together among the monstrous boles of the plane-trees. We sang "Annie Laurie," in token that we, too, knew mountain songs of our own land.

Next day we left the town in fêteday mood and took the train d'omnibus for Banyuls, and while we are still in the plains let me tell of the delights and fellowships and fragrance of travelling third-class in a train d'omnibus. If the seats are wooden and the floors dirty, even for a hobnailed boot, if the prevalent odor is garlic and the population not entirely human, and if the population shows no inclination to stay in the train when you leave it, that is no matter. A peasants' train is an endless and bewitching novelty.

"Place" in their faces. Behind them was a narrow alley, with one dim lantern swinging from a sign and a velvet slit of night between the leaning roofs. The songs they sang were in Catalan, songs

There are old ladies and young men. The delight of the old ladies is only equalled by the scorn of the young men