One felt it near and anguishing, that season of clouds and of long rains, which returns every time with the same air of bringing the definitive exhaustion of saps and irremediable death,--but which passes like all things and which one forgets at the following spring.
Everywhere, in the wet of the leaves strewing the earth, in the wet of the herbs long and bent, there was a sadness of death, a dumb resignation to fecund decomposition.
But the autumn, when it comes to put an end to the plants, brings only a sort of far-off warning to man, a little more durable, who resists several winters and lets himself be lured several times by the charm of spring.

Man, in the rainy nights of October and of November, feels especially the instinctive desire to seek shelter at home, to warm himself at the hearth, under the roof which so many thousand years amassed have taught him progressively to build .-- And Ramuntcho felt awakening in the depths of his being the old ancestral aspirations for the Basque home of the country, the isolated home, unattached to the neighboring homes.

He hastened his steps the more toward the primitive dwelling where his mother was waiting for him.
Here and there, one perceived them in the distance, indistinct in the twilight, the Basque houses, very distant from one another, dots white or grayish, now in the depth of some gorge steeped in darkness, then on some ledge of the mountains with summits lost in the obscure sky.

Almost inconsequential are these human habitations, in the immense and confused entirety of things; inconsequential and even annihilated quite, at this hour, before the majesty of the solitude and of the eternal forest nature.
Ramuntcho ascended rapidly, lithe, bold and young, still a child, likely to play on his road as little mountaineers play, with a rock, a reed, or a twig that one whittles while walking.

The air was growing sharper, the environment harsher, and already he ceased to hear the cries of the curlews, their rusty-pulley cries, on the rivers beneath.