The Basques now hold to Roman Catholicism with firmness, and are an industrious, hospitable, and very courteous people, and are not given to excess or extravagance. They also differ from the city-loving Celts, according to Mommsen, in their love of the country. They delight in scattered habitations, and many of the Basque villages have scarcely anything that can be called a street. When they emigrate, it is to South rather than to North America, the Pampas life seeming to attract rather than to repel them. ‘In forty-eight hours after their arrival,’ said a French chargé d’affaires at Montevideo, ‘you will find not a Basque in the town.’ It is very interesting, too, that in South America the dolichocephalic Basques are always regarded as distinct from Spaniards and Frenchmen, the brand of their race being deeper than the superficial signs of their nationality!
It is a rare thing to see a plough in the Basque Country, and the writer has not yet done so. Instead of this ancient labour-saving implement these remarkable people use the laya, or two-pronged digging-fork. This curious implement has a handle coming from one side, and is thus in the form of the letter h. One often sees a row of six or seven villagers—men, women, and children—working shoulder to shoulder. All the forks are raised aloft simultaneously, then driven into the soil from the full length of the arm perpendicularly, and when the forks have been driven home with the foot, the soil is turned over like a furrow by the pushing forward of all the forks in a row. In this way a width of ground about eight feet wide, more or less, according to the number of diggers, is ploughed into furrows with wonderful rapidity, for the people work with the greatest energy, which often surprises the stranger, who, on crossing the frontier, expects to enter a land of idlers.
No. 12. BIARRITZ TO PAMPLONA.
LEAVING BIARRITZ
The road to the main-line station of Biarritz also takes one to the highway for St. Jean de Luz and the Spanish frontier; but there is another route closer to the sea, indicated in the sectional map, which joins the dusty national road near Bidart, and, being shorter and less frequented, is worth consideration, although there are one or two places where one needs to go slowly in order to take the right turning.
ST. JEAN DE LUZ
is a quaint and attractive little town on flat ground almost level with the sea at the mouth of the Nivelle. There is also an oval bay protected by breakwaters.
In the town there are several picturesque half-timbered houses with upper stories projecting on carved wooden corbels, and in the main street is the very typical Basque church of St. Jean Baptiste, in which Louis XIV. was married to the Infanta Marie-Thérèse of Spain on June 9, 1660. The interior suggests a spacious concert-hall or theatre rather than a church, for it is an aisleless structure with three tiers of black oak galleries fixed against the walls one above the other. The men, in accordance with the Basque custom, occupy the