Difficulties always lessen after a decision.  I casually question a doughty Colonel, who has been an indefatigable traveler; he has twice girdled the earth, and has many times cross-hatched Spain; he has not been to the Pyrenees, but heartily urges the trip.  He assures me that the banditti there have become, he believes, comparatively few; that they now rarely slit their captives’ ears, and that present quotations for ransoms, so he hears, are ruling very low, much lower than at any previous epoch.  Thus comforted, we interview other traveled friends; but our goal is to all an unvisited district.  We find no kindly Old Travelers returned from Pyrenees soil, to counsel us, advise us, and inflict well-meant and inordinate itineraries upon us.  At least, then, we are not alone in our ignorance; it is evident that our knowledge of the region is not blamably less than that of others, and that the Pyrenees are in literal fact a land untrodden by Americans.

Questions of accessibility now arise.  It seems a far cry from Paris to the doors of Spain.  The Pyrenees are not on the way to Italy, as are the Alps.  They are not on the way around the world, as are the Mountains of Lebanon and the Sierras.  They are not strictly on the way even to Spain.  But we consider.  Our country men are streaming to Europe, quick-eyed for unhackneyed routes, throwing over the continent new and endless net-works of silver trails.  They travel three full days to reach the Norway fjords, and five in addition to see the high noon of midnight.  They journey a day and night to Berlin, and forty-two hours consecutively after, without wayside interest, to visit the City of the Great Czar; if they persevere toward the Kremlin, and around by “Warsaw’s waste of ruin,” they will have counted a week in a railway compartment.  Constantinople and Athens lie two thousand miles away, Naples and Granada nearly as far; all sought, even in summer, though quivering in the tropics’ livid heat.  We came round to our Pyrenees:  it needs from Paris but nine hours to Bordeaux, with coigns of vantage between; in four hours from Bordeaux, you are by the waters of the Bay of Biscay, or in six, in the centre of the Pyrenees chain.

IV.

And so La Champagne leaves its long wake across the Atlantic, and we journey down from Paris to the little city of the Maid of Orleans; wander to Tours, the approximate scene of the great Saracenic defeat; drive along the quays of Bordeaux, and visit its vineyards and finally come on, in the luxurious cars of the Midi line, to the shores of Cantabria and the popular watering-place of Biarritz.

CHAPTER II.

A BISCAYAN BEACH.

Clearly we are in advance of the summer season at Biarritz.  It is the latter part of June.  The air is soft and warm, the billows lap the shore enticingly.  But fashion has not yet transferred its court; the van of the column only has arrived.  A few adventurous bathers test the cool surf; the table-d’hote is slimly attended; the liverymen confidentially assure us, as an inducement for drives, that their prices are now crouching low, for a prodigious leap to follow.