And young girls, young women gather also, having nothing of the awkwardness of the peasants in other provinces of France, elegant, refined, graceful in costumes of the new fashions; some wearing on their hair the silk kerchief, rolled and arranged like a small cap; others bareheaded, their hair dressed in the most modern manner; most of them pretty, with admirable eyes and very long eyebrows--This square, always solemn and ordinarily somewhat sad, is filled to-day, Sunday, with a lively and gay crowd.
The most insignificant hamlet in the Basque country has a square for the ball-game, large, carefully kept, in general near the church, under oaks.
But here, this is a central point and something like the Conservatory of French ball-players, of those who become celebrated, in South America as well as in the Pyrenees, and who, in the great international games, oppose the champions of Spain.

So the place is particularly beautiful and pompous, surprising in so distant a village.

It is paved with large stones, between which grass grows expressing its antiquity and giving to it an air of being abandoned.

On the two sides are extended, for the spectators, long benches--made of the red granite of the neighboring mountain and, at this moment, all overgrown with autumn scabwort.
And in the back, the old monumental wall rises, against which the balls will strike.

It has a rounded front which seems to be the silhouette of a dome and bears this inscription, half effaced by time: "Blaidka haritzea debakatua." (The blaid game is forbidden.) Still, the day's game is to be the blaid; but the venerable inscription dates from the time of the splendor of the national game, degenerated at present, as all things degenerate.