' You may sit out after dinner in that
delicious climate, listening to the rush of the clear Adour through
streets, and yards, and culverts; for the city, like Romsey, or
Salisbury, is built over many streams. You may watch the Pyrenees
changing from white to rose, from rose to lead colour, and then dying
away into the night--for twilight there is little or none, here in
the far south.
'The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out,
At one stride comes the dark.'
And soon from street to street you hear the 'clarion' of the
garrison, that singularly wild and sweet trumpet-call which sends
French soldiers to their beds. And at that the whole populace swarms
out, rich and poor, and listens entranced beneath the trees in the
Place Maubourguet, as if they had never heard it before; with an
order and a sobriety, and a good humour, and a bowing to each other,
and asking and giving of cigar-lights between men of every class--and
a little quiet modest love-making on the outskirts of the crowd,
which is very pleasant to behold. And when the music is silent, and
the people go off suddenly, silently, and soberly withal (for there
are no drunkards in these parts), to their early beds, you stand and
look up into the 'purple night,' as Homer calls it--that southern
sky, intensely dark, and yet transparent withal, through which you
seem to look beyond the stars into the infinite itself, and recollect
that beyond all that, and through all that likewise, there is an
infinite good God who cares for all these simple kindly folk; and
that by Him all their hearts are as well known, and all their
infirmities as mercifully weighed, as are, you trust, your own.
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