With the Carlists [pp. 801-815]

18S4.] WITH THE CA)?IJSTS. Soi
WITH THE CARLISTS.
IN the fall of 1S73 I was instructed to proceed to northern
Spain, and, if possible, to push my way to the headquarters of
the partisans of Don Carlos, who were then striving desperately
to push their way to Madrid. On leaving London I obtained
recommendations from the Carlist committee in permanent session there to the Carlist Junta in permanent session at Bayonne,
and, what turned out to be of infinitely greater practical advantage, letters of credit on a banker and letters of introduction
to a few British adherents of the royal cause.
The Junta revealed itself as a grave body of elders, who held
perpetual pow-wows, and whose chief aid to the arms of 1~is
Most Catholic Majesty appeared to consist in mumbling gossip,
manufacturing canards, roiling cigarettes, and sipping chocolate.
They gave me certain credentials, and told me that I would probably come across the gentlemen to whom I had my letters of
introduction at the Fonda de la Play a in St. Jean de Luz.
At the " Inn on the Beach I' was not surprised to hear that
my compatriots were at Biarritz, but might be expected back at
any moment. St. Jean de Luz, though nominally French, is
thoroughly Basque, and takes more interest in Spanish politics
`than in French. The landlord was a Frenchman and a cook,
and fortunately paid more attention to his kitchen than to
affairs of state-an excellent thing in a landlord; his wife was a
Thiadrilene and worshipped the ex-Queen Isabell~, whom she
resembled in dowdy obesity; but their daughter, a plump,
homely, black-eyed lassie of sixteen, Thiaria del Pilar, was a sworn
Carlist. She had been born in St. Jean de Luz, and liad inhaled
its attachments with its atmosphere. I roamed round the place,
with its massive, ancient houses with sculptured lozenge-shields
over their entrances, its dusty promenade shaded with trees, its
quaint, heavy gray church, its background of green slopes, and
the crescent-shaped inlet which it edged-the inlet into which
the billows of the Bay of Biscay, soothed to well~tempered
waves, came tumbling over each ot1~er on the sands in touslcd,
white-haired frolic.
As I re-entered the common room of the inn I observed two
gentlemen, one the antithesis of the other in appearance-one
voL. xxxix.-5i