the beach we see many of their villas.  In days before the railroad went beyond, the port exchanged regular and almost daily steamers with San Sebastian and Santander, thus connecting with the Spanish rail, and giving a rather important traffic advantage.  It fostered, besides, extensive cod-fishing and even whaling enterprises.  Its harbor has suffered since; the rails too have gone through to Spain, and St. Jean is left mildly and interestingly mournful, in its lessened power, its decayed gentility.

IV.

In St. Jean de Luz, we are fairly in the country of the Basques.  One sees so many of that singular people in the streets, and along the Biscayan shore generally, that inquiries about them are almost forced upon the attention.  The Basques are still the curiously ill-explained race they have always been; the learned still disagree over their origin, and the world at large scarcely knows of them more than the name.  They are scattered all through this lower sea-corner of France, shading off near Bayonne; and are in yet greater numbers in the adjoining upper edges of Spain.  It seems strange that the beginnings of this isolated race should to-day be almost no better settled than in the time of Humboldt or Ramond.  Yet they contrive still to embroil the philologists and historians.  Here the race has lived, certainly since the days of the Romans, probably since long before, out of kin with all the world, and the world’s periods have passed on and left them.  No one knows their birth-mark; they have forgotten it themselves.  Of theories, numberless and hopelessly in discord, each still offers its weighty arguments, and each destroys the certainty of any.

This appears incredible.  What mystery is insoluble in the sharp light of modern research?  Yet until the defenders of the view that the Basques came from Atlantis can make truce with the advocates of their Phoenician origin,—­until the well-attested theory of their affinity with certain South American races can overthrow the better-attested theory that they are the remains of the ancient Iberians,—­until Moor and Finn,[7] Tartar and Coptic, can amicably blend their claims to relationship, the Basques must remain as they are,—­foundlings; or rather, a race whose length of pedigree has swallowed up its beginnings.

[7] It is said that the Basque nomenclature of domestic animals is almost entirely Finnish.

It is these unattached sea and mountain races who are always hardest to conquer.  Hence the boast of the Basques.  Even the Romans, though they could defeat, could not subdue them.  The strong Roman fortress of Lapurdum (now Bayonne) did not succeed in even terrifying them, though they were worsted several times by its legions.  Down through all the early part of the long Christian era, the forefathers of these frank-faced fishers and mountaineers we see here in the streets of St. Jean kept their hills stubbornly