and positive as might be wished. The present is merely a tentative, and not, in any sense, a final essay towards its solution.

How are these legends told now, and how have they been preserved? They are told by the Basque peasants, either when neighbours meet—after the fashion made familiar to us by American novelists in the “Husking Bee”—for the purpose of stripping the husks from the ears of maize, an operation generally performed in one or two long sessions; or at the prolonged wedding and other feasts, of which we have evidence in the tales themselves, or else in the long nights round the wintry hearth of their lonely dwellings. For it is one of the charms of the Basque land that the houses are scattered all over the face of the country, instead of being collected into crowded villages; and it is, perhaps, to this fact chiefly that we owe the preservation of so much old-world lore, and of primitive ideas, among this people. The reader must not be surprised at the length of some of our specimens. The details of the incidents of the longest are religiously preserved and, as told at home, they are probably more lengthy (as anyone will understand who has ever taken anything down from recitation) than as here given. Many an unlettered Basque peasant could serve an irritable stranger as Glendower did Hotspur, when he kept him “at least nine hours in reckoning up the several devils’ names that were his lackeys.”

In La Soule the “Pastorales,” or Basque dramas, which last from six to eight hours of uninterrupted action, are learnt in the same way by word of mouth during the long evenings of winter.

These legends are still most thoroughly believed in. They still form part of the faith of these simple people—not at all, we need hardly say, in the use of mythological or atmospheric allegory, but as narratives of veritable fact. They believe them as they do the histories of the Bible or the “Lives of the Saints.” In fact, the problem of reconciling religion and science presents itself to their minds in this strange guise—how to reconcile these narratives with those of the Bible and of the Church. The general solution is that they happened before the time of which the Bible speaks, or before Adam fell. They are “Lege zaharreko istorriguak”—“histories of the ancient law”—by which is apparently meant the time before Christianity. “This happened, sir, in the time when all animals and all things could speak,” was said again and again by our narrators at the commencement of their story; not one doubted the literal truth of what they told. Their naïve good faith occasionally severely tested our own gravity. Appeal was often made to our supposed superior knowledge to confirm the facts. The varying tone of the voice told how truly the speakers sympathised with what they uttered. At times sobs almost interrupted utterance, when the frequent apostrophe came: “Think how this poor so-and-so must have suffered!” More often bursts of laughter at traditional jokes, too poor to raise a smile on less unsophisticated lips, broke the recital. Very determined, too, is their adherence to what they believe to be the genuine text of these old tales. “I don’t understand it, but the history says so;” “It is so;” “The story says so,” was positively affirmed again and again—e.g., in one of the Peau d’Ane or Cinderella stories, when the lady has dazzled her admirer by her dress of silver (moonlight?), then of gold (sunlight?), then of diamonds (dew-drops?), at last, on the wedding-day, the bride and bridegroom dress each other. “I don’t know why,” interrupted the story-teller, “but the story says so.” Could anything tell more quaintly of the marriage of the sun and dawn? The sun decking the morning clouds with his light and beauty, and they