The chief summer industry of San Sebastian is sea-bathing. The soldiers begin it at six o'clock in the morning, marching by regiments down to the Concha, clearing for action, and striking out into the gentle surf, all in simultaneous obedience to successive words of command. Some two hours later teams of oxen draw scores of jaunty bathing cars down near the white lip of this opalescent shell of water, and there the long day through all ages, sizes, and ranks of humanity sport in the curling foam or swim far out into the sparkling bay.
San Sebastian is the capital of Guipúzcoa, one of the three Basque provinces. These lie among the Cantabrian mountains, and are delightfully picturesque with wheat-growing valleys and well-wooded heights. As the train wandered on, in its pensive Spanish fashion, we found ourselves now in Scotland, in a beautiful waste of heather and gorse, now amid the English ivy and hawthorn, hearing the song of the English robin, and now in our own New England, with the hilly reaches of apple orchards and the fields upon fields of tasselled Indian maize.
The Basques are a thrifty folk, and have cultivated their scant acres to the utmost. The valleys are planted with corn, the lower hills are ridged and terraced for a variety of crops. Above are walnuts and chestnuts, and the flintiest summits serve for pasturage. It was curious to see men at work on those steep slopes that had been scooped out into a succession of narrow shelves, and more strange yet to catch glimpses of peasants ploughing the very mountain top, picturesque figures against the sky.
The reaping is of the cleanest. The harvest fields have a neat, scoured look, as if the women had been over them with scrubbing brushes. Yet this utilitarian soil admits of oaks and beeches, ferns and clover, morning glories, dandelions, pimpernel, and daisies.
All that sunny morning the train swung us blithely on from one charm of the eyes to another--from a ruined watch-tower, where red-handed Carlists had crouched, to a bright-kerchiefed maiden singing amid her beehives; from a range of abrupt peaks, cleft by deep gorges, to sycamore-shaded byways and poplar-bordered streams; from a village graveyard, the pathetic little parallelogram enclosed in high gray walls and dim with cypress shadows, to a tumbling, madcap torrent spanned by a time-gnawed Roman arch. Shooting the heart of some black hill, the train would run out on a mere ledge above a valley hamlet, and from pure inquisitiveness, apparently, ramble all around the circle, peering down from every point of view on the cluster of great, patriarchal houses, sometimes of timber and plaster, more often of stone, where whole clans dwell together under the same red-tiled roof. Queer old houses these, occasionally topped with blue chimneys, and now and then with a fantastic coat of arms sculptured over the door, or a fresco of saints and devils blazoned all across the front. Sometimes freshly whitewashed, these Basque houses have more often a weather-worn, dingy look, but, however black the timbers, lines of clean linen flutter airily from roofs and balconies.