“Why pluck’st thou me? Then, as the dark blood trickled down its side, These words it added: Wherefore tear’st me thus? Is there no touch of mercy in thy breast? Men once were we that now are rooted here.”
Though the sun was hot, the pine needles seemed to shiver, the branches swayed to and fro in the air, and gave out a kind of sigh which sometimes increased into an inarticulate wail. We look up, almost expecting to see the harpies sitting
“Each on the wild thorn of his wretched shade.”
Could we stop, we might question these maimed trees and learn some fearful tragedy from the imprisoned spirits. Perhaps they recount them to each other in the wild winter nights when the peasants, listening with a kind of fear in their lone huts, start up from their beds and say it is Rey Artus--King Arthur--who is passing by with his long train of dogs, horses, and huntsmen, from an old legend of the time of the English occupation which says that King Arthur, as he was hearing Mass on Easter-day, attracted by the cries of his hounds attacking their prey, went out at the elevation of the Host. A whirlwind carried him into the clouds, where he has hunted ever since, and will, without cessation or repose, till the day of judgment, only taking a fly every seven years. The popular belief that he is passing with a great noise through space when the winds sweep across the vast moors on stormy nights probably embodies the old tradition of some powerful lord whose hounds and huntsmen ruined the crops of the poor, who, in their wrath, consigned them to endless barren hunting-fields in the spirit-land--a legend which reminds us of the _Aasgaardsreja_ of whom Miss Bremer tells us--spirits not good enough to merit heaven, and yet not bad enough to deserve hell, and are therefore doomed to ride about till the end of the world, carrying fear and disaster in their train.
In a little over an hour we arrived at Dax, a pleasant town on the banks of the Adour, with long lines of sycamores, behind which is a hill crowned with an old château, now belonging to the Lazarists. The place is renowned for its thermal springs and mud-baths, known to the Romans before its conquest by the Cæsars. It was from Aquæ Augustæ, the capital of the ancient Tarbelli (called in the Middle Ages the _ville d’Acqs_, or _d’Acs_, whence Dax), that the name of Aquitaine is supposed to be derived. Pliny, the naturalist, speaking of the Aquenses, says: _Aquitani indè nomen provinciæ_. The Bay of Biscay was once known by the name of Sinus Tarbellicus, from the ancient Tarbelli. Lucan says: