Swami

your honor's consent, adoption ceremony will take place at once. will do it."

"Does the old lady really believe this monstrous fable?" I asked.

"Swami told her," said Bishwas Dass, "and she believes all he says."

"Does she?" I said grimly. "She is not so well acquainted with him as the judge of Lucknow used to be."

"But, after all," added Bishwas Dass ingenuously, "we have incarnation, so I may have been her son once."

"Well, you may certainly," I said; "but remember what I told you, and be a good son to the old lady now."

Bishwas Dass took his departure, greatly relieved. He apologized profusely on behalf of the Swami for not inviting me to the ceremony, but only

the Swami and the Chelas were to be there, and one of Miss Krag's relations besides herself. I think he was slightly afraid of any possible criticism of his Sanscrit and ancient Vedic ceremonies, for the adoption was to take place according to Aryan, or rather Pre-Aryan, rites.

The next morning I found my friend the hotel clerk deep in the "Oilville Times and Herald." "Well," he said, "this is a thing which I guess will convulse Oilville. Ain't you going to the ceremony as a friend of the family, Mr. Phillips?"

"What ceremony?" I asked; and for all response the clerk showed me the first page of the newspaper. There it all was, in large print, in the very crudest and coarsest of headlines:

going, Mr. Phillips? You ought to give away the bride-the mother, I meanto the arms of her long-lost son. Well, old man Krag would have gone just crazy if he had thought of a thing like that: it's enough to make him turn in his grave. What's the points of that black young man anyway? If she wanted a son, couldn't she have taken a white one? There are a goood many about this town would just have jumped at the offer. Well," continued the clerk philosophically, "women do

curious things; but this beats all. Seems to me, if he is a reincarnated son, she oughter have a reincarnated husband too. Where's he, I want to know? Why ain't he around? I don't seem to hear of him, somehow, unless it's you, Mr. Phillips?"

"No," I said, "I'm not the man." "Perhaps, then," continued the clerk, "he don't live in this town; possible he's gone to the Himalayas for a spell; perhaps he's seen Miss Krag and his re-created son, and don't fancy either of them. What do you think, Mr. Phillips?"

"I don't think about it at all," I said; "but one thing I know, that reporter will not be there."

"Won't he, though, my dear sir? You don't know the American reporter. But even if he ain't there, it don't matter a cent-the description will be on hand all right: you may bet your life on the young man of the 'Oilville Times and Herald.'

And sure enough, next morningthough Bishwas Dass assured me that no outsider was present-there was a glowing description of the whole function which quite absorbed popular attention in Oilville, to the total exclusion of three fires, a murder, and the absconding of a bank clerk, which events happened on the

same day.

Miss Krag and her adopted son left Oilville very quietly-not even the omniscient reporter being aware of their departure; and soon after I, too, found myself on my way back to Calcutta.

I heard as time went on that there was no particular fault to be found with Bishwas Dass as a son. East is East, and West is West, and this very oddly assorted couple probably did not find it all smooth sailing. However, Miss Krag was perhaps as happy as Blackwood's Magazine.

any foolish woman who has done an incomparably foolish thing could reasonably expect to be. Bishwas Dass was reported to be outwardly fairly respectful, and perhaps he did not swindle her much. At all events, he did not murder her, for the poor old lady died of cholera about four years later in an American missionary's house at Benares. Greatly to the scandal of her hosts she insisted on dying as a Hindoo, and her body was burnt on the banks of the Ganges.

I had almost forgotten this strange episode, when, driving out one evening in Calcutta, I met a truly luxurious native carriage with a coachman in gorgeous livery, and two footmen standing behind the barouche with flyflappers in their hands. In the carriage there sat a fat Baboo merchant, surrounded by his family, and after the profound salaam he made me I had little difficulty in recognizing my old friend Bishwas Dass, who had at last reached the summit of his ambition, and had become a flourishing jute-merchant. There he sat, his half-quizzical, half-devotional look softened by age and obesity, and with his diminutive wife and three plump bedizened little girls looking like a stout elderly Krishna surrounded by tiny "Gopis."

I heard that he was going to stand as a candidate for the municipal ward in which I have a vote, and if he would only repeat some of his hymns in that inimitable cackle of his, and would tell us some of his real experiences with Miss Krag, I am sure the English merchants would plump for him to a man. But possibly the respectable head of the wealthy firm of "Bishwas Dass & Co." could hardly be expected to condescend to such frivolities.

T. Hart-Davies.

I.

THE BASQUES: AND AN OLD SEA-PORT.

In the Middle Ages an island of the Northern seas, lying in the welter of oceanic weather, was inhabited by an energetic race of men given to commerce, sea-farers, sea-fighters. And eight degrees further south, a country as fertile and smiled upon by much more amiable, though still uncertain, skies, bore also an energetic and commercial race, sweeping the seas in more or less legitimate enterprise as far as the island of the north. These two races have to-day certain common characteristics. They both emigrate naturally, as it were, to America, though to different sides of the Isthmus of Panama; and both, wherever they go, carry with them their passion for a national game, played with a ball. One game is cricket and the other is pelota. And the excellent players of these respective games are famous and revered among their countrymen; and of no consequence anywhere else. But here the likeness ceases. For one of these races has made itself master of the great ocean and the great trade of the world; it is called the British Empire and the United States. The other is divided between three provinces of Spain and one department of France, and is called the ancient and interesting Basque race.

No one knows anything of its origin. The most learned and the most ignorant alike can guess that at one time it would have covered a much larger space on the map than it does nowonly that was long before there was a

1

map-and that it has been driven up into this corner of Europe by invasions of stronger peoples. Nevertheless the Basques are not physically poor. Although seldom very big, they are not particularly small; they are well-knit and healthier in appearance than the majority of the lower classes in England. Their language is agglutinative; in itself a proof of remote antiquity. One of our most distinguished Celtic scholars once nursed a transitory hope that he might find cause for relating it to Pictish; and he learnt some. What kind of a feat that was may be guessed from the story the Basques themselves tell to explain why they are so good. The devil, they say, noticed with pain how few Basques came to hell, and so he determined to learn their language in order to entice them on the road. But when he had lived a whole year in the country he could still say no more in Basque than good-morning. So he gave the matter up; and that is why the Basques are still so good.

In the fifteenth century pirates were doubtless good; at any rate the Basques were pirates. So were the English, the Dutch, and the French, in fact all sea-faring nations of the time. The sea was No-man's land and the eternal war of commerce was carried on there openly with the mailed fist. The Basques had houses of commerce in Bordeaux, in La Rochelle and Brussels, and traded with Scotland and the Hanseatic towns. They brought a good number of Dutch, English, and French ships into the harbor of Pasajes and sold them and their cargoes at auction. They sent out thousands of whalers and cod-fishers, and in the seventeenth century almost monopolized

the Newfoundland fisheries. The English drove them out, as they would have driven out the English if they had been strong enough. The last big commercial enterprise they attempted was the Compañia Real Guipúzcoana de Caracas, founded in 1728, for trading with South America. And it flourished well for three and twenty years, when the king, jealous perhaps of so much provincial prosperity, transferred its Board of Directors to Madrid; and presently the Company withered away. The Basques are still busy in a small way. They have no leading industry that I have been able to discover-except making each other's sandal shoes -but little factories of various kinds stud their mountain streams, which they utilize largely for electric power. Something of the cause of Basque prosperity in the past and its subsequent decline may be found in the picturesque little harbors of the coast of Guipúzcoa from Pasajes to Motrico. These are for the most part smaller than the smallest of our west country seaports, but they remind me of Dartmouth, Salcombe, Fowey, and Boscastle. These too were great ports in the days of little ships, and if we had had none better, Britannia would certainly not have ruled the waves. Pasajes is considerably the largest. It could take our men-of-war a hundred years ago; it has a modern history and a possible future. But Zaraus, Guetaria, Orio, Deva sit widowed by their tiny harbors, looking out in vain to the great empty Atlantic, over whose far horizon so many sails came winging towards them in the good days gone by: pirates and merchantmen, cod-fishers and whalers, from the north and the west and the north-west.

Now the Basques of Guipùzcoa were free-traders, which was

one reason

why they objected to the abolition of their liberties, or fueros, and to complete union with the Kingdom of

Spain. Nevertheless, in the fourteenth century when the wool of Navarre went to Bilbao by way of Deva, the city laid a small tax on all the wool embarked at the port, and with the proceeds built the parish church of the Assumption. At the first glance it would appear no different from the other churches of Guipùzcoa, although somewhat larger than ordinary. A square-bodied church, the tower square, with a flattish, slightly pointed roof, the large portico cut out, as it were, under the west end. Within it you are surprised by a wonderful Gothic gateway, fretting with its sculptures the breadth of the wall before you. To left and right in its shallow embrasure stand ranks of Apostles, above are scenes from the life of the Virgin, the Assumption in the centre. Now blessed be the penny on wool which reared this noble portal--and also the cloister within-to the honor of Our Lady and for the glory of the city of Deva! The wool-merchants of Navarre have gone their way, have passed like shadows, and of all their goods nothing remains except those pennies of the tax which they paid so unwillingly. The port of Deva seems scarcely a port at all. The sea sand has silted up half the bay and only little vessels creep in at the little river mouth. The face of Nature has changed, but the work of Man remains, essentially uninjured by the years.

As we stood in the high portico admiring the sculptured archway, the doors were opened wide, and we saw right up the big dark church, which, like others of its type, is practically all nave, to the high altar. A procession was coming down it with a yellow flicker of candle flames and a golden glitter of vestments. As it came towards the daylight, the moving shapes and chanting voices gathered definiteness. The round-cheeked choristers two and two, the priests in faded crimson copes, with faces like yellow wax

the Litany to the Virgin, with the haunting choric pathos of its Ora pro nobis, welled up clear from the throats of the choir boys, hummed nasal from the waxen-faced priests, and echoing under the shallow vaulting of the roof, passed out, and died away along the square. Precisely these words, precisely these tones, the portico has been echoing since the builder's hand left it here fresh and new: when the short, deep-bodied ships rode at anchor in the bay, when the grass-grown strand of Deva stood full of bales of wool and trains of mules with their muleteers, and there was a noise of sailors' chanties and running chains and tackle, a chatter of merchantmen in Basque and in Castilian, and it may be in other languages beside, where now is silence, except for the occasional hoot and rattle of a passing train, and the children playing at hop-scotch.

There are always plenty of children in a Basque pueblo. but on this particular Sunday morning they seem to be nearly all boys. Perhaps here, as in Protestant England, the little girls are suffering the martyrdom of the best frock. At any rate, when the procession, sparsely accompanied by one or two black-hooded women, issued from the portico and passed along the side of the square, there was such a running and scrambling of little boys from the side streets that you would have thought the Pied Piper, or at least a circus, had come to town. Chubby little boys, not in the least picturesque, with very short trousers and dirty faces, much as you might have seen them-on a weekday-in England. With noises of delight, and no signs of piety whatever, they came running after the procession, and followed it in a crowd till it reached the chapel to

very

which it was bound. This was an odd, ugly erection facing down a lane, and looking like a box with one side out. There was scarcely room in it for the gaudy altar in the middle and the troop of clergy and choristers who crowded into it, like a too numerous company of amateur actors on to a drawing-room stage. But the sweet solemn singing was not yetover, and outside the chapel the flock of busy, trotting children stopped short and, forming up in some sort of order, plumped down on their little bare knees, and, with clasped hands and bowed heads, said their little prayers before the chapel; so redeeming its tawdry ugliness, its vulgar theatre air, and making a picture of Paradise in the squalid street.

But we hurried back to see the cloister behind the church before the service began. A small door leads into it from the dark nave. It is light and bright, and the tall graceful arches of its windows surround what was once a graveyard, but is now a garden of abundant bloom. The windows are barred with slender shafts of stone, which, on a level with the spring of the arch, are transformed into a geometric design. But two are different from the others, and more beautiful. These are together in a corner. Behind them, beyond the pantile roof of the cloister, rises the tower of the church, and below them a tall tree of yellow roses showers its boughs, a cataract of blossom, over a bed of purple irises. It had rained earlier that morning, and the roses and pinks were smelling sweet in the high sun, which threw hard, black shadows athwart the tracery of the windows.

I find no mention of the church of Deva by architectural authorities, but I believe it to be the only one of the kind in Guipùzcoa. The gateway with its sculptured figures, and the geometrical cloister, judged merely by the eye, would seem to be widely separated in