Navarre is held to be one of the chief bulwarks of Clericalism in Spain, and so remote and isolated are its villages, so primitive its life and agriculture, so few its means of communication, that it might seem that no breath of modern times could have penetrated to this province. Lying on the frontier of France, it is defended from the inroads of civilization by its mountains and wide wastes of desert land. In those lonely groups of houses of massive yellow-brown stone, clustered around their church, and crowning rocky hills of the same colour, there is no room for differences of opinion, and he who does not attend Mass at least once in the year is forced to go and live elsewhere. Should you ask how he can be forced to go, the answer you will receive is, “By the law, by public opinion.” Quite recently a traveller, arriving famished at one of these villages of Navarre, with no smaller change than a French napoleon, went from door to door in vain. No one would accept this _doblón de oro_ (gold doubloon). Finally, a woman who had lived for a time at Salies de Béarn consented to receive it, and sent it later to be changed at the capital, Pamplona. Yet even here in Navarre there is an appreciable body of liberal opinion, and even in the heart of the Carlist country, at Estella, the Club Carlista is faced by the ensign of the Círculo Liberal; even here in all but the smaller villages opinion is divided, and the policy of Clericals and anti-Clericals discussed with animation. Those who served in the second Carlist war recognize that the times have altered, and that leaders, or _cabecillas_, are no longer forthcoming to lead them in swift night marches across the hills, willing though they might be to follow. At Estella a fort taken by the Carlists is now a peaceful covered market-place, and the palace where Don Carlos held his court is a pleasant _fonda_ with a cool _patio_ of flowers. Those who enter Navarre by the Convent of Roncesvalles and the Pass where Roland was slain, and which Byng a thousand years later, in 1813, was forced to evacuate with ten thousand troops, may be easily deceived into imagining that Navarre is a land of meadows and green woods and pleasant streams. The swift river Urrobi runs through passes of rugged hills, but overgrown with box and beech trees and pines. Steep walls of rock are in summer covered with foxgloves and bramble and broom, scabious, St. John’s wort, mallow, bell heather, and many other flowers and ferns, and in places the hills are red with wild strawberries. The Urrobi forces its way through barriers of grey rock and over ledges in green pools and white rushing torrents. But this is not the true Navarre. There no trees are to be seen, and one is perpetually in a wide circle of bare hills. The country is the most desolate imaginable, formed by bare, ashen-grey hills (scored and gashed by dry torrent-beds) and valleys equally barren. The wind hisses, and crickets chatter loudly in a few stunted elms by the roadside. All is greyness without colour, and in late summer the stubble-fields far and near add a new note of desolation, and it seems out of keeping with the character of the country that these fields should ever be a fresh green in spring. Indeed, the occasional hollows of olives and plots of vineyards have an air of unreality in the surrounding wilderness of crumbling dust and shale. Yet some welcome patches of colour are to be found, if it is only a line of chicory or of huge purple thistles along a stubble-field, or a blue-bloused peasant jogging down the dusty road on a mule with crimson trappings. And on the threshing-floors around the villages, where work is carried on far into the night, often by lightning flash, the white shirts and blue blouses of the men, and the pink and red dresses and long white headkerchiefs of the women form a picturesque and beautiful scene through the clouds of flying chaff and ruddy golden grain falling in heavier, more compact masses. For here the threshing is all done by hand with the help of mules, oxen, and horses, which are driven round and round, drawing all the children of the village on little wooden sledges. When the grain has been thus sifted, the process is completed by throwing it into the air from long wooden shovels and close-pronged wooden forks. The corn is grown on precipices and sheer mountain-sides, and is brought down to the threshing-floors on donkeys, which disappear beneath their rustling load. The men who live in this grim country are also stern and grim, harsh featured, hard, and strong; and, though hospitable and not unkindly, they are fierce and obstinate upon occasion, and sometimes cruel to their animals.