206 EARLY REMINISCENCES floor. To his astonishment he heard a heavy tread proceeding to the great staircase and ascend it, step by step, leisurely. He saw the green baize door at the head of the stairs swing open, and heard the tread pass along the gallery beyond. No man could be less superstitious and more unimaginative than my father. He told us his experience next morning at breakfast, and added that he could in no way explain what he had seen or heard. I retu;tn on my steps to say something further upon Biarritz. It was long a mere fishing village, and when we were there in 1851 it consisted of an inn, and a few villas that belonged to Bayonne merchants, besides the cottages of the fishermen. The heaths around were overgrown with blue lithospernum and crimson daphne cneorum, and the effect of the wide-stretched sprinkling of rose and azure was wondrously beautiful. There are rocks at Biarritz, but these are replaced a little way south by sea cliffs of black marl. Biarritz is mentioned in the eleventh century, when whales were harpooned there by Basque fishermen. At that period there existed large storehouses at the Old Port, in which were preserved barrels of oil and bundles of whale-bone. The tithe of the whale and cod fisheries constituted the principal source of income to the bishops of Bayonne. In course of time the whales abandoned the Bay of Biscay, as no longer wholesome to them, and migrated northward. Trade fell off, and the fortunes of Biarritz declined. An old castle, erected for the defence of the port, stood on the height called L'Atalaya, but it fell into ruins, and the sea, eating into the soft cliffs, munched up the buildings about the port, and Biarritz decayed to a miserable hamlet. Picturesque lakes lie buried in the cork and pine woods on the north of the Adour, formed mainly out of the old bed of the river which formerly discharged into the sea at Vieux Bucout. The cork trees are systematically and periodically stripped of their bark, but very rapidly repair the loss by the production of a fresh outer coat. The pine trees are also hardly treated. To obtain the resin that exudes from them, a slice is made in the bark, and a little pot is placed in a hole below in the ground, that receives the resin as it trickles down. It is somewhat pathetic seeing these trees weeping into the lachrymatories at their feet. So soon as the
