"Ah, yes; you may do that sure enough, but it is not so easy to learn Basque!"
If I could not learn Basque I could learn of the Basques, and what I did learn was so much to their credit that it is only fair to write it down. They were not Thugs, they were neither sanguinary nor thievish. The peasantry of the Basque provinces are the finest in Spain—intelligent, hospitable, brave, gentle, but fiercely fanatical where religion is concerned. Instances were narrated to me of travellers who had been arrested by them, being liberated without damage to person or detriment to purse. In one case a Frenchman was robbed by a small party, but his money and papers were restored to him a few days after by one of the chiefs, with an apology. The correspondent of the Temps, who accompanied the army in a previous Carlist campaign, informed me that after a skirmish in which forty Carlists were captured, he was anxious to send an account of the affair to Paris, but he did not know how.
"Hold!" said a colonel, "I'll find you the means."
He called over a prisoner, and asked him if he were let off on parole, would he take a letter through the disturbed district, and post it on the other side for a French gentleman? The man pleaded fatigue.
"You'll be well paid."
At last he consented; my informant gave him the letter and a five-franc piece. While monsieur was searching his pockets for more money to give him, the prisoner said:
"I have no change, caballero; how shall we manage?"
The prisoner duly set off; the letter was duly posted and duly arrived, and the prisoner faithfully returned and delivered himself up. Honour is not yet extinct in the Basque provinces, nor is magnanimity in the Spanish army. The commandant dismissed the peasant with a look of admiration and a push on the back. But some fireside philosopher will argue:
"Why, these honourable fellows cut telegraph wires and fire on railway trains."
The Carlists explain: "The telegraph and the railway are our greatest enemies; the one sends for reinforcements, the other brings them."