A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees

A trip to the Pyrenees is not in the Grand Tour. It is not even in any southerly extension of the Grand Tour. A proposition to exploit them meets a dubious reception. Pictures a...

Clearly we are in advance of the summer season at Biarritz. It is the latter part of June. The air is soft and warm, the billows lap the shore enticingly. But fashion has not ye...

In the morning, a dashing equipage rolls up to the doorway of the Grand Hotel. A "breack" is its Gallicized English name. It has four white horses, with bells on the harness, an...

The days pass happily by, at Biarritz. One quickly feels the charm of the place; it has its own delightfulness, apart from the season and its amusements. In the season, however,...

We glide smoothly away from St. Jean de Luz and its legends, by the unlegendary railroad. The track curves southward, with frequent views of the coast, and it will be but a few...

The next day an indolent morning train draws us back to the frontier. The landscape is rather shadeless; "a Spaniard hates a tree." It should be but a twenty-minute ride, and so...

Returning to Hendaye, a train takes us again to Bayonne, connecting there for Orthez and Pau. The ride to Bayonne needs an hour or less, and from thence to Orthez calls for two....

When the Count of Foix made a hunting trip to his _château mignon_ on the present site of Pau, he found it a goodly journey. There were quagmires and waste land to pass, and the...

It is a nineteenth-century sun that wakes us, after all, each morning, through the Gassion's broad windows. We can reconjure foregoing eras, but we do not have to live in them....

The road toward Eaux Bonnes retraces its steps from Eaux Chaudes almost to Laruns, before it swings off into the other southward gorge. The ride in all is about four miles,--two...

"Yet through its fairy course, go where it will, The torrent stops it not, the rugged rock Opens and lets it in; and on it runs, Winning its easy way from clime to clime."

Cauterets confirms its first good impressions. The next day proves cloudy and foggy, and we spend it lazily, re-reading and answering letters, or wandering about the town, absor...

"Parting is such sweet sorrow." Thus it is at Cauterets. The hotel manager evinces it as well as we. But the hour has come to leave him, and the tinseled supernumerary enters, l...

During the night the weather has another revulsion of feeling. In the morning it is hysterical, laughing and crying by turns. We come down-stairs booted and spurred for the asce...

An agreeable little city we find about us, the next day. Bigorre is one of the most well-known of the Pyrenean resorts, and has a steady though not accelerating popularity. The...

"_Perle enchâssée au sein des Pyrénées Par l'ouvrier qu'on nomme l'Éternel, Je te prédis de belles destinées; L'humanité te doit plus d'un autel. Car l'étranger dans ta charmant...

We revolve an unhappy fact, as we ramble on along the brilliant Allée, this clear summer evening. We are no longer among the time-wealthy. With Barcelona and the Mediterranean i...