Around the Pont International, on both the French and Spanish sides, is as queer a collection of stray dogs and cats as one will see out of Constantinople. They are of a "_race imprécise, vraies bêtes internationales_," the customhouse officer tells you, and from their looks there's no denying it. They may not be wicked, may only bark and not bite, mew and not scratch, but only they themselves know this. To the rest of us they look suspicious. From Hendaye one may enter Spain by any one of three means of communication,--by railway, on foot across the Pont de Béhobie, or by a boat across the Bidassoa. The first means is the most frequented; for a _piécette_--that is to say a _pièce blanche_ of Spanish money, which has the weight and appearance of a franc, but a considerably reduced value--one can cross by train; a boatman will take you for half the price at any time of the day or night; and by the Pont International, it costs nothing. [Illustration: _The Frontier at Hendaye_] This international bridge belongs half to France and half to Spain, the post in the middle bearing the respective arms marking the limits of the territorial rights of each. This is one of the most curiously ordained frontiers in all the world. The people of Urrugne in France, twenty kilometres distant from the frontier, can hold speech freely in their mother tongue with those of Feuntarrabia in Spain, but officialdom of the customs and railway organizations at Hendaye and Irun, next-door neighbours, have to translate their speech from French to Spanish and vice versa, or have an interpreter who will. Curious anomaly this! Hendaye's chief shrine is a modern one, the singularly-built house, on a rock dominating the bay, formerly inhabited by Pierre Loti, though most of his fellow townsmen knew him only as Julian Viaud, Lieutenant de Vaisseau. This, though the commander of the miserable little gunboat called the "_Javelot_" stationed always in the Bidassoa was an _Académicien_. At the French entrance to this important frontier bridge one reads on a panel PONT INTERNATIONAL; and at the Spanish end, PUENTE INTERNACIONAL; and here the _gendarme_ of France become the _carabiniero_ of Spain. Béhobie, at the Spanish end of the bridge, the French call "the biggest hamlet in Europe." It virtually is a hamlet, but it has some of the largest business and industrial enterprises in the country, for here have been established branch houses and factories of many a great French industry in order to avoid the tariff tax imposed on foreign products in the Spanish peninsula. The game has been played before elsewhere, but never so successfully as here. [Illustration: _Maison Pierre Loti, Hendaye_]