forms of religious faith in all regions of our mother earth. What the reader falls in love with is in each case a milieu, to which he finds himself bound in a kind of sacramental relation—so much of its natural beauty, and so much of its elemental humanity have entered, with such an exquisitely melancholy commentary, into his heart through his thrilled senses.
Let us have one illustration of Loti's white magic, aspersing his pages with the odors of a delicious spring in the Pyrenees, on the soft nights when young Basque smugglers run their contraband over the Spanish border and return in time for early mass:
For Ramuntcho, it is the time when smuggling becomes a calling almost without fatigue, with hours of positive delight: climbing towards the mountain-tops through springtime clouds; crossing ravines, wandering in the regions of the springs and wild fig-trees; sleeping, while waiting for the hour agreed upon by the complacent carbineers, on beds of mint and ragged robin. . . . The wholesome fragrance of the plants impregnated his clothes, and his jacket, which he never wore, but used only as a pillow or a coverlet—and Gracieuse would sometimes say to him in the evening: "I know whither your smuggling took you last night, for you smell of the mint of the mountain above Mendiazpi."
There certainly is one of Loti's extraordinary achievements: to make each one of nearly two score volumes of which the scenes are wherever a French cruiser calls or the colonial empire has extended—to make each volume stir all the senses and reek of its proper scene as pungently as the jacket of Ramuntcho reeked of the mint of the mountain above Mendiazpi.
