Towards that hill, and the Nivelle at its foot, the land slopes down, still wooded and broken, bounded by a long sweep of clayey crumbling cliff. The eye catches the fort of Secoa, at the mouth of the Nivelle—once Wellington’s sea-base for his great French campaign. Then Fontarabia, at the Bidassoa mouth; and far off, the cove within which lies the fatal citadel of St. Sebastian; all backed up by the fantastic mountains of Spain; the four-horned “Quatre Couronnes,” the pyramidal Jaysquivel, and beyond them again, sloping headlong into the sea, peak after peak, each one more blue and tender than the one before, leading the eye on and on for seemingly countless leagues, till they die away into the ocean horizon and the boundless west. Not a sail, often for days together, passes between those mountains and the shore on which we stand, to break the solitude, and peace, and vast expanse; and we linger, looking and looking at we know not what, and find repose in gazing purposeless into the utter void. Very unlike France are these Basque uplands; very like the seaward parts of Devon and Cornwall. Large oak-copses and boggy meadows fill the glens; while above, the small fields, with their five-barred gates (relics of the English occupation) and high furze and heath-grown banks, make you fancy yourself for a moment in England. And the illusion is strengthened, as you see that the heath of the banks is the Goonhilly heath of the Lizard Point, and that of the bogs the orange-belled _Erica ciliaris_, which lingers (though rare) both in Cornwall and in the south of Ireland. But another glance undeceives you. The wild flowers are new, saving those cosmopolitan seeds (like nettles and poppies) which the Romans have carried all over Europe, and the British are now carrying over the world. Every sandy bank near the sea is covered with the creeping stems of a huge reed, which grows in summer tall enough to make not only high fences, but fishing-rods. Poverty (though there is none of what we call poverty in Britain) fills the little walled court before its cottage with bay trees and standard figs; while wealth (though there is nothing here of what we call wealth in Britain) asserts itself uniformly by great standard magnolias, and rich trailing roses, in full bloom here in April instead of—as with us—in July. Both on bank and in bog grow Scorzoneras (dandelions with sword-shaped leaves) of which there are none in these isles; and every common is ablaze with strange and lovely flowers. Each dry spot is brilliant with the azure flowers of a prostrate Lithospermum, so exquisite a plant, that it is a marvel why we do not see it, as ‘spring-bedding,’ in every British garden. The heath is almost hidden, in places, by the large white flowers and trailing stems of the sage-leaved Cistus. Delicate purple Ixias, and yet more delicate Hoop-petticoat Narcissus, spring from the turf. And here and