1828.] [ 461 ] 
A TALE OF THE PYRENEES, 
Tue fair of Oleron, though attended by a concourse of al the neigh- 
bouring rustics, was reputed duller, and more brief in duration, than 
on any former occasion. The bright May-day on which it was held 
served little to animate the crowd ; and long before the customary revels 
by moonlight, Dominic Etchegogen had packed up his little basket, and 
grasped his stout staff, on his road homewards. It would be idle to seek 
any certain cause for that stagnation of entertainment which resulted 
solely from accident. - Where scattered people, without common grounds 
of pleasure or interest, fall together at the hazard of being lively, or the 
reverse, it will often happen, as on this day, that they require the aid of 
more social sympathies and’ personal attachments to secure the happy 
end for which they have assembled. In vain the puppets doled out their 
proper parts ;—in vain were put forth the little stalls, on which were 
gorgeously displayed the famous handkerchiefs from Pau, and the linens 
still farther brought from the factories of Tarbes ;—in vain were the 
choicest hams of the district suspended in goodly array, and the 
renowned mountain-mules made to caracole in the exercise-ground. Sun- 
set seemed the signal for an almost general retreat ; and Etchegogen, as 
before mentioned, was one of the earliest seceders. 
He was an honest and substantial householder of the little town of 
Barcus, seated, as every one knows, in the department of the Bas Pyre- 
nees, and not far from one source of the pleasant river Adour, of which 
the two principal streams, taking their origin in the same mountains 
which give rise to the Gallego and the Arragon, finally coalesce near the 
town of Peyrehorade, and fall into the ocean between Bidart and Ordres. 
He proceeded on his way, meditating much as concerning the degeneracy 
of men, and the sluggishness of the market ;—he thought to have been 
more fortunate in his sales and purchases, and to have met a pretty face 
or two, which, for lack of smiles, seemed to have lost their prettiness. 
Every now and then a word of mongrel French would escape his lips in 
testimony of his ill-humour ; and the premature dimness brought on by 
__ the early sinking of the sun behind the hills of Larreau seemed to annoy 
him still more, as if he half-regretted that he had come away from the - 
_ fair, the dulness of which might now be remedied by twilight freaks and 
festivity. Without pursuing farther the current of his peevishness, he 
may now be fancied as having arrived within a short distance of his native 
place, the small town of Barcus, and had reached the old wooden bridge 
that connects the two banks of the principal stream that gives its tribu- 
tary waters to the Adour. It seemed to him, in spite of the increasing 
kness, that he could distinguish a human form skulking among the 
_ brushwood on the left, as if with the intent to watch his own route. The 
‘strangeness of this sight provoked his curiosity rather than his apprehen- 
ion. He shouted lustily, and in a friendly tone, to the unknown ; but 
an answer far different to any that he had expected was returned to him 
before his own words had well issued from his lips. A slight movement 
among the leaves was the prelude to the report of a rifle, levelled too 
truly at the honest farmer. The shot struck him, but in no vital part ; 
he rolled along the bridge to its very parapet, and had not recovered his 
consciousness before a number of villagers, startled by the sound, had 
collected around their wounded friend. The aggressor had fled, or still 
