Ramuntcho

of seeing always, beyond her horizon, distant abysses and darkness, and, although he was not an insulter of sacred things, never would he pray, thus giving to her this excess of remorse, of having allied herself to some pagan to whom heaven would be closed forever. His friends were similar to him, refined also, faithless, prayerless, exchanging among themselves in frivolous words abysmal thoughts.--Oh, if Ramuntcho by contact with them were to become similar to them all!--desert the churches, fly from the sacraments and the mass!--Then, she remembered the letters of her old father,--now decomposed in the profound earth, under a slab of granite, near the foundations of his parish church--those letters in Euskarian tongue which he wrote to her, after the first months of indignation and of silence, in the city where she had dragged her fault. "At least, my poor Franchita, my daughter, are you in a country where the men are pious and go to church regularly?--" Oh! no, they were hardly pious, the men of the great