However, I am bound to admit that Fontarabia and San Sebastian make a most interesting day’s work. I had never been in Spain before, and so was well on the alert when a fellow-passenger, as we slowed on approaching the station, pointed across the sands below us and said, “There’s Fontarabia!” There, perhaps two miles off, lay a small gray town on a low hill with castle and church at the top, and gateway and dilapidated walls on the side towards*us, looking as though it might have gone off to sleep in the seventeenth century--a really curious contrast to bustling Biarritz from which we had just come. We went down to the ferry and took a punt to cross the river, which threaded the broad sands left by the tide. It was full ebb; so our man had to take us a long round, giving us welcome time for the view, which, when the tide is up, must be glorious. Our bare-footed boatman, though Basque or Spaniard, was quite “up to date,” and handled his punt pole in a style which would make him a formidable rival of the Oxford watermen in the punt race by Christ Church meadow, which, I suppose, is still held at the end of the summer term. A narrow, rough causeway led us from the landing-place to the town-gate in the old wall, where an artist who had joined the party was so taken with the view up the main street that he sat down at once to about as difficult a sketch as he will meet in a year’s rambles. For from the gateway the main street runs straight up the hill to the ruined castle and church at the top. It is narrow, steep, and there are not two houses alike all the way up. They vary from what must have been palaces of the grandees--with dim coats-of-arms still visible over the doorways, and elaborately carved, deep eaves, almost meeting those of their opposite neighbours across the street--to poor, almost squalid houses, reaching to the second story of their aristocratic neighbours’, but all with deep, overhanging, though uncarved eaves, showing, I take it, how the Spaniard values his shade. Up we went to the church and castle, the ladies looking wistfully into such shops as there were, to find something to buy; but I fancy in vain. Not a tout appeared to offer his services; or a shopkeeper, male or female, to sell us anything. Such of the Fontarabians as we saw looked at us with friendly enough brown eyes, which, however, seemed to say, “Silly souls! Why can’t you stop at home and mind your own business?” Even at the end of our inspection, when we spread our lunch on a broad stone slab near the gate--the tombstone once, I should think, of a paladin--there being no houses of entertainment visible to us, we had almost a difficulty in attracting three or four children and a stray dog to share our relics.