From the idle peace of the Begoña cloisters, as from the old-time world, we looked long on this Spanish city of to-day, seething with manifold activities. We seemed to understand how, to the middle-class Spaniard, hemmed in by all this mediæval encumbrance of barracks, cathedrals, castles, and thrones, such cities as Bilbao and Barcelona, pulsing with industrial energy and enterprise, are "more beautiful than Beauty's self." The Basques, like the Catalans, take readily to business. They set their mountain cascades to turning mill-wheels, they canal their little Nervion till it can give passage to ships of four thousand tons burden, they paint the night with the flare of mighty furnaces. Every year they are building more wharves, more railroads, more electric tramways, and they are so prodigiously proud of their new iron bridge, with its flying ferry, which whisks passengers over from Portugalete to Las Arenas at the rate of two hundred a minute, that they stamp it on their characteristic jewelry. That cunning Eibar work of the Basque provinces displays again and again, on locket, bracelet, brooch, this incongruous design of the _Puente Vizcaya_ beaten on chased steel in gold.
We looked regretfully out over those significant reaches of land which we would have liked to explore to the last hearthstone. The Basque provinces! We had not even set foot in Vitoria, the capital of Alava, where is preserved the grim old _machete_ by which Basque governors were sworn into office. "May my head be cut off with this knife," ran the oath, "if I do not defend the _fuéros_ of my fatherland."
And we longed to attend one of the peasant festivals, to see the lads play _pelota_ and the lasses step Basque dances to the music of the village pipers, to hear the wild old marches and battle tunes that have roused the Roman and the Moor to arms. The mystery plays of the Basques were famous once, and although these naive dramas are now mainly confined to Christmas and Easter, who could say that we might not chance on some saint-day fragment? There was soon to take place, too, in one of the Vizcayan hamlets a "blessing of the fields," a processional harvest rite of pagan antiquity, formerly universal in Spain, but now confined to a few rural districts. We had a hundred reasons for lingering--but what are reasons? Pilgrims of St. James must put fresh peas in their shoes and be off for Compostela.