Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/65

Rh plodded gloomily along, and I got into half a dozen scrimmages with the country people. At last matters began to look serious, and the too hospitable host took his two guests back to their home. I managed to stagger upstairs; I was deadly pale, with staring eyes, and compelled to use the depressed walk of a monkey, when I met my mother. She was startled at my appearance, and as I pleaded very sick she put me to bed. But other symptoms puzzled her. She fetched my father, who came to the bedside, looked carefully for a minute at his son and heir, and turned upon his heel, exclaiming, "The beast's in liquor." The mother burst into a flood of tears, and next morning presented me with a five-franc piece, making me promise to be good for the future, and not to read Lord Chesterfield's "Letters to his Son," of which she had a dreadful horror. It need hardly be said that the five francs soon melted away in laying in a stock of what is popularly called "a hair of the dog that bit."

What we learnt last at Pau was the Bearnais dialect. It is a charmingly naïve dialect, mixture of French, Spanish, and Provençale, and containing a quantity of pretty, pleasant songs. The country folk were delighted when addressed in their own lingo. It considerably assisted me in learning Provençale, the language of Le Geysaber; and I found it useful in the most out-of-the-way corners of the world, even in Brazil. Nothing goes home to the heart of a man so much as to speak to him in his own patois. Even a Lancashire lad can scarcely resist the language of "Tummas and Mary."

At length the wheezy, windy, rainy, foggy, sleety, snowy winter passed away, and the approach of the warm four months, warned strangers to betake themselves to the hills. this time the chosen place was Argélés. In those days it was a little village, composed mainly of one street, not unlike mining Arrayal in Brazil, or a negro village on the banks of the Gaboon. But the scenery around it was beautiful. It lay upon a brawling stream, and the contrast of the horizontal meadow-lands around it, with the backing of almost vertical hills and peaks, thoroughly satisfied the eye.

We two brothers, abetted by our tutor, had fallen into the detestable practice of keeping our hands in by shooting swifts and swallows, of which barbarity we were afterwards heartily ashamed. Our first lesson was from the peasants. On one occasion, having shot a harmless bird that fell among the reapers, the latter charged us in a body, and being armed with scythes and sickles, caused a precipitous retreat. In those days the swallow seemed to be a kind of holy bird in the Bearnais, somewhat like the pigeons of Mecca and Venice. I can only remember that this was the case with old Assyrians and Aramæans, who called the swift or devilling the destiny, or foretelling bird, because it heralded the spring.