through the wet streets of Pau amid a storm of snow and rain, and a spectacle full of more intensely rheumatic associations could no where be witnessed. As we jogged along behind the grey horse, the facetious M. Martin had a joke to crack with every man, woman, and child we encountered; and the black eyes lighted up famously, and the classic faces grinned in high delight, at the witticisms. "I suppose you are speaking Bearne?" I said. "The fine old language of the hills, sir. French!--no more to be compared with it than skimmed milk with clotted cream." "And you speak Spanish, too?" "Well, if a gentleman contrabanda, who takes walks over the hills in the long dark nights, with a string of mules before him, wished to do a small stroke of business with me, I daresay we could manage to understand each other." And therewith M. Martin winked first with one eye, and then with the other. "And Basque," said I, "you speak that also?" M. Martin recoiled: "No man who ever did live, or will live, could learn a word of that infernal jargon, if he were not a born Basque. Learn Basque, indeed!--_Mon Dieu, monsieur!_ Don't you know that the Devil once tried, and was obliged to give it up for a bad job? I don't know why he wanted to learn Basque, unless it were to talk to the fellows who went to him from that part of the country; and he might have known that it was very little worth the hearing they could tell him. But, however, he spread his wings, and flew and flew till he alighted on the top of one of the Basque mountains, where he summoned all the best Basque scholars in the country, and there he was for seven years, working away with a grammar in his hand, and saying his lessons like a good little boy. But 'twas all no use; he never could keep a page in his head. So one fine morning he gave a kick to the books with one foot, and a kick to the masters with the other, and flew off--only able to say 'yes' and 'no' in Basque, and that with such a bad pronunciation that the Basques couldn't understand him."