There are numerous little villages en route which will not detain one except for their quaintness. One passes innumerable oxen, all swathed in swaddling clothes to keep off the flies and plodding slowly but surely along over their work. A train of Spanish mules or smaller donkeys pulling a long wagon of wood or wool is another common sight; or a man or a woman, or both, on the back of a little donkey will be no novelty either. This travel off the beaten track, if there is not much of note to stop one, is delightful, and here one gets it at its best. Stop anywhere along the road at some inn of little pretence and you will fare well for your _déjeuner_. It will be very homely, this little Basque inn, but strangers will do very well for their simple wants. All one does is to ask "Avez-vous des oeufs? Avez-vous du jambon? Du vin, je vous prie!" and the smiling rosy-cheeked _patronne_, whose name is Jeanne, Jeannette, Jeanneton, Jeannot or Margot--one or the other it's bound to be--does the rest with a cackling "Ha! he! Eh ben! eh ben!" And you will think you never ate such excellent ham and eggs in your life as this Bayonne ham and the eggs from Basque chickens--and the wine and the home-made bread. It's all very simple, but an Escoffier could not do it better. The peasant's work in the fields in the Basque country may not be on the most approved lines, and you can't grow every sort of a crop here in this rusty red soil, but there is a vast activity and an abundance of return for the hard workers, and all the Basques are that. The plough is as primitive as that with which the Egyptian fellah turns up the alluvial soil of the Nile, but the Basque makes good headway nevertheless, and can turn as straight a furrow, up the side of a hill or down, as most of his brothers can on the level. In the church at Bunus is a special door reserved in times past for the descendants of the Arabs who had adopted Christianity. Here in the Basque country you may see the peasants on a fête day dance the fandango with all the ardour and the fervour of the Andalusians themselves. Besides the fandango, there is the "_saute basque_," a sort of a hop-skip-and-a-jump which they think is dancing, but which isn't the thing at all, unless a grasshopper can be said to dance. "Le Chevalet" is another Basque dance whose very name explains itself; and then there is the "Tcherero," a minuet-sort of a dance, wholly by men, and very graceful and picturesque it is, not at all boisterous. The peasants play the _pastoral_ here as they do in Languedoc and Provence, with good geniuses and evil geniuses, and all the machinery that Isaac Watts put into his hymns for little children. Here the grown men and women take them quite as seriously as did the children of our nursery days. [Illustration: "_Le Chevalet_"]