the trouble. It is like nothing else. It is very impressive, very dreary, very strange. But yet, though it has grown much larger and much higher since you first saw it, you cannot help feeling that it does not look its size. It has none of the tremendous hugeness which is so distinctive of the great Swiss masses, and in that sense it is disappointing. But it is very wonderful, and it leaves a memory that does not fade, especially if you look at it before sundown, when the light falls full upon its depths, and the black and white of its rock and snow stare out at you in vivid sharpness. Some day, perhaps, visitors will get to the bottom wall by train; for amongst the projected railways between France and Spain is one which would come up from Pierrefitte and Luz, pass through the cirque, and then enter a tunnel under the chain, so as to join Tarbes to Saragossa. Civilisation has to answer for a good deal already, but it has not yet committed such an utter abomination as this. The Cirque of Gavarnie with rails, a station, and return tickets! And this to please Tarbes and Saragossa! As the cirque is the great essential show of the Pyrenees, it seems almost idle to talk of any other spot after it; but yet it is not possible to be silent about Luchon. All the other towns are insignificant, but Luchon is a capital. No other place in the world represents beauty and pleasure in the same degree; no other town is so thoroughly typical of the district over which it presides. One can no more imagine the Pyrenees without Luchon, than Luchon without the Pyrenees; neither of them is conceivable without the other; together, they form a picture and its frame. A region of loveliness, amusement, and hot water, needed a metropolis possess ing the same three features in the highest degree; in Luchon they are

concentrated with a completeness of which no example is to be found elsewhere. No valley is so delicious; nowhere is there such an accumulation of diversions; nowhere are there so many or such various mineral springs. If it be true that a perfect capital should present a summary of the characteristics and aspects of its country, then Luchon is certainly the most admirable central city that men have built, for no other represents the land around it so faithfully as Luchon does. Neither Mexico, nor Merv, nor Timbuctoo, nor Lassa, nor Winnipeg, nor Naples, attains its symbolic exactness.

And as if to bestow on it something more special even than all this, nature has placed snow-crests right in front of it, so that it is the only bathing town of the entire chain from which you can see a central peak, and in which you can realise that you are amidst true mountains. And yet, at Luchon, as elsewhere, the mountains count for little. People ride up to the col, at the Port of Venasque, and say they are very much pleased, but the veritable life of Luchon is within itself. It is not always a very innocent life; the gentle purities of Luz are not much asked for; there is, indeed, a certain amount of rather riotous behaviour (especially since the new casino and its gambling have got to work): but it is a remarkably joyous existence, and that is all that is wanted by most of the people who go there. The ravishments of Luchon are so intense, its elegances

are

so dilated, and they are both so utterly out of place in such surroundings, that the contrast becomes absurd by its own exaggeration. The Maladetta, the "Accursed Mountain," frowns down upon lace, satin, dining, flirtations, and fans; there is much baccarat in the shadow of the overhanging ice; and a good deal of very decided iniquity goes

on in a vale that was made for Paul and Virginia. However, it is easy to keep clear of this side of Luchon; its other aspects are so delicious that they help you to forget its revelling (unless there happens to be a supper-party in the next room to yours), and you can wander by the streams, and on the slopes amidst the flowers, as far from the world as if you were all alone in the hanging gardens of Babylon. It is as indispensable to know Luchon as to see Gavarnie, and it is much less fatiguing. As for all the other places, the guide - books tell of them.

The feeding in the Pyrenees is generally good, but it is ordinary French fare, and has no local character; izard and trout are the only indigenous products, and they are not plentiful. Wild flowers are infinitely more abundant, and they are both various and charming: they are not mean little colourless bastards, as they so often are elsewhere, but fine, vigorous, highly tinted growths, which would not be out of place in gardens. The deep pink clusters of rhododendron (Alpenrosen), the superb sheafs of golden star-shaped arnica, the red-blue cups of gentian, the violet casques of aconite, and, more than all, the admirable thistles-white, purple, or yellow, according to the variety, -cast a garment like Joseph's coat upon the higher pastures. The thistles are so wonderful in size, in form, in colouration, that they incline the beholder to indulge the rarest of rare ambitions-to wish that he were a donkey for a while, that he might eat them. All people who paint should make a portrait of a good specimen; only nobody would believe it to be true when they got home, so unlike are these noble prickles to any of their fellows elsewhere. They are perhaps the most authentically indigenous offspring of the Pyrenees.

In legends the Pyrenees are poorer even than in meats. Mountains lend themselves to fable, and in other hands the peaks and ravines of the south of France would certainly be peopled with traditions. But with the sole exception of the Lays of the Troubadours, the French have no mythology. The wild memories that have come down to us in such abundance from the Norseman and the German have scarcely any echoes in Gaul. The Pyrenees possess but one of these exciting epics-half history, half ecstasy, half reality, half dream,

which constitute so large a part of the early literature of Scandinavia and Germania. Here and there some fairy stories may be found, but all are poor and ill constructed; and, in truth and fact, the chain can claim one single real legend. That one, however, is so great, so grand, so dominating-it is so immense, so universal, so world-widethat it suffices all alone; it creates a doctrine by itself, it needs no aid, no support, no companions-it is the mighty tale of Roland. The mountain is full of Roland. His hands, his feet, his horse, his sword, his voice, have left their puissant mark on almost every crest, in almost every glen. Above Gavarnie, amidst the eternal snow, gapes the slashed fissure hewn by Durandal.

Ten miles off, in a gorge, you see the indents of the hoofs of Bayard on a rock which served as his half-way touching point when he sprang in two flying bounds from the Brêche to the Peak of the Chevalier, near St. Sauveur. At the Pas de Roland, above Cambo, the rock remains split open where the hero stamped and claimed a passage. The ponds of Vivier Liou, near Lourdes, were dug by the pressure of his foot and knee when Veillantif, the charger which carried him in his last fight, but who was then unbroken, had the auda

city to throw him. At St. Savin, where the monks had lodged him, he paid his bill by slaying the irreverent giants Passamont and Alabaster, whose neighbourhood was unpleasant to the convent. And so on, all about. His tremendous figure is everywhere, all full of the superbest violence and of the most wondrous acrobatry. But it is at Roncesvaux that his great name is greatest. There, where he died, his memory lives in an unfading halo. In Spain, beneath the Peak of Altabiscar, amongst the beech-groves, on 15th August 778, perished the astounding Paladin. The Song of Roland tells how he fell, not quite exactly, but very amazingly; the story is so intensely interesting that the reader is carried away by it, and finds himself, for a moment, almost able to believe it. It does not

A cry has arisen

matter that the defeat is attributed to the Saracens, not one of whom was present (the whole thing having been got up and carried out by the Basques alone); that error was indispensable to the tale, and gives it much of its strange charm. And yet the Song of Roland, with all its fame, is not the best poem which exists about the strife at Roncesvaux. Another version has come down to us. In the Chant of Altabiscar the Basques have left their own story of the day. The Song speaks for the vanquished, the Chant for the victors. And the latter is so simple, so stately, and so high, that, of the two, it is certainly the grander. It is so admirable, so little known, and withal, so short, that it is well worth while to give a translation of it. Here it is :

Right on to their heads.

them.

One! And not one more !

It is finished!

The critics assert that this noble chant is modern. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is. But what does that matter? Its vigour of description, its impressiveness of form, are independent of all age. It is more exact, too, than the song, and puts the affair more really as it happened. Only it omits to say that, instead of kissing their wives and going to bed, and leaving the eagles and eternity to settle about the dead, the Basques stripped and pillaged them, as was usual in those days.

There exists a book, called 'Les Légendes des Pyrénées,' which professes to enumerate the traditions of the hills. Let no one buy it; it is so stupid, that even on the wettest day no wretched sojourner at an inn could manage to read it through. And it does not even mention Roland! It is true that Taine does not speak of him either. Decidedly, the French care little for tradition; and yet, if it be true,

as

Victor Hugo asserts, that it is "the daughter of religion and

the mother of poetry," its family connections are really respectable enough to entitle it to better treatment.

But if the Pyrenees have no legends, they possess a very real history. In no corner of Europe has there been more war, more massacring, more variety of hard hitting; so, as the chronicles of peoples are made up principally of murder-as those who have the most of carnage have the most of history (whence it has been said that happy are the races who have none of it)-the Pyreneans have a big place in tale. The prehistoric inhabitants of the range have left abundant marks of their uncomfortable and nasty ways in all the caves and caverns; and the Romans built baths, roads, and temples, of which vestiges are being discovered every year; but of their fighting we know nothing, though we may safely presume that it was considerable. The records of slaughter begin seriously about the sixth century, and persist, with remark

able regularity, until the Carlist rising of three years ago. Basques, Béarnais, Bigorrais, "ceux de Foix," Roussillonais, and all the rest, have fought all round, for pure love of blows, without being particular about the cause; they have battled alternately for or against all their own and all the neighbouring chieftains; they have gone to war for every sort of reason-from cowstealing to the salvation of their souls. But it is just to recognise that, with all their affection for smiting as an art, the great dominating motive of their belligerence was neither robbery, nor religion, nor revenge; they fought for freedom far more than for anything else. Everywhere and always mountain races have objected to obey a master, and the Pyreneans have behaved in this respect quite as vigorously as any of their colleagues on other hills. They loved their liberty so well, that, once upon a time, almost every valley sheltered a republic, almost every village was a state within itself. It was not until some three hundred years ago that the last of the fighting peasants accepted a sovereign. So long as it was possible to struggle they refused to own a king, whether from France, Navarre, or Aragon. The entire chain was a debatable land, all full of frontier raids, of local hates, of border frays, of pillage, oppression, and suffering. Signs of the old state of things remain; at the entrance of many of the gorges, on projecting rocks, stand ruined keeps, where templars, robber lords, or English invaders (we did a quantity of iniquity out there) levied toll and bullied their neighbours. Those republics were such tough institutions-they were so full of vigour, of vitality, of sap -that one of them has positively come down to us in its old reality, unweakened and unchanged, to

show us what the others were like. The famous valley of Andorra became independent in 805, when Louis the Débonnaire granted it a charter. It had to recognise the Bishop of Urgel as its seigneur, and to pay him a tax; but in all else it was absolutely free, and free it has remained ever since.. Some of the bishop's rights of suzerainty became transferred, in time, to the Counts of Foix, and passed on with Henry IV. to the crown of France; but Andorra has still the very same political constitution that it received more than a thousand years ago from the son of Charlemagne. It is still a republic; it still pays its annual assessment to its old lords, just as it did in the ninth century. France receives from it £38 a-year, and the Bishop of Urgel gets £18; and three deputies go down each spring to do homage to France, in the person of the Prefect of the Ariége. And so this wonderful little district, with its ten or twelve thousand inhabitants, persists in its isolated existence, and in its national title of "The Valleys and Sovereignty of Andorra." It is a model of what nearly every vale in the Pyrenees once was. All the others have been successively incorporated into France or Spain; but this one still holds out, a democratic Monaco, 4000 feet above the sea. A political dispute occurred there the other day; Europe was terrified by the news of an impending revolu tion in Andorra; but the suzerains interfered and stopped it, without asking for anything for themselves. With that exception, no sorrow has been known up there since 1793. In that year the Andorrans had the most grievous fright in their long existence; for the French Republic of the period refused to receive the £38, on the ground that it was a feudal impost contrary to the dig