to the inheritance, will succeed to the kindly disposition as well, and with a sunny-faced waiting-woman looks after details of comfort with a personal interest.  Our famous lunch at Laruns was both so ample and so recent that now we ask only for “tea and toast,” and so, while the lamps are lighted, the trays are brought to us in the parlor, and around the centre-table and before the fire we nibble tartines in soothed content and plan to-morrow’s excursion.

Later in the evening we pause at the little office in the hall, behind whose window sits Madame, busy with her knitting yet watchfully supervising all the details of the household.  She chats with us freely, speaking slowly in her clear, low-toned French,—­that southern French which sounds the vowels and the final e so lingeringly,—­telling us of the village and its surroundings, of the people, of herself; questioning us about America, (where, she tells us, lives one of her daughters;) welcoming us evidently with the greater regard as being of the few she sees from that active, far-off land.

IV.

The low, steady, insistent rumble and rustle of the torrent below our windows becomes almost ghostly in the stillness of the midnight.  It is coming from the dark and mysterious forests it so well knows, the same unchanging water-soul it has been in the days of the Pyrenees past.  One almost ascribes to it the power of audibly retelling its past, as it intones its way onward below us; infusing our dreams with subtle imaginings of the spirit of dead times, the pathetic forgottenness of the mountain lives that have been lived within its sound, the roysterings of the knights who have hunted along its coursing.

For into these forests often rode Gaston Phoebus and his fierce men of Orthez, in pursuit of a fiercer than they, the now disappearing Pyrenees bear.  At no time was superstition more rife than then; savage souls were imputed to these savage animals; the spectres of the killed brutes returned to trouble the dreams of the hunter-knights, as the growl of their familiar torrent penetrates ours.  We seem to hear old Froissart’s voice above the sound, believingly telling a legend of the hunt: 

“’Sir Peter de Bearn has a custom, when asleep in the night-time, to rise, arm himself, draw his sword, and to begin fighting as if he were in actual battle.  The chamberlains and valets who sleep in his chamber to watch him, on hearing him rise, go to him and inform him what he is doing; of all which, he tells them, he is quite ignorant, and that they lie.  Sometimes they leave neither arms nor sword in his chamber, when he makes such a noise and clatter as if all the devils in hell were there.  They therefore think it best to replace the arms, and sometimes he forgets them and remains quietly in his bed.’

“‘Holy Mary!’ said I to the squire, ’how came the knight to have such fancies, that he cannot sleep quietly in bed but must rise and skirmish about the house!  This is very strange.’