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Night drew on apace. Dry logs were piled in profusion on the fire, soon kindling up into a cheerful blaze. Huge rashers of bearsmeat smoked upon the embers, to which we paid our duties as they in turn became “cooked”. Our botas of wine and brandy went their rounds, gladdening the hearts of our hospitable entertainers. After it was dark, three men entered bearing the carcase of a large bear which they had killed, probably our old acquaintance. These people were all extremely diminutive in stature, and in from loose and ungainly. To a man they all bore the brand of the horrible goître.

I had resolved on passing the night by the fire, notwithstanding the preparations which had been made for my repose.

Drawing my cloak round me, I thrust myself, cigar in mouth, in a corner of the chimney, and puffing away complacently, enjoyed the scene around me.

Enlivened by the unwonted stimulus of wine and spirits, the Cagots soon forgot their miseries and wretched condition in the pleasures of the moment.

They sang and danced, apparently apostrophizing the muleteers for their unlooked for munificence in bestowing upon them the unconsumed fragments of their puros i.e. cigars. Producing a cracked instrument, the like of which was never conceived by votary of Orpheus, one of them strummed a strange discord to which the men sang and the women danced.

Their wan and squalid figures “lit into life” by the novel excitement, moving here and there through the smoky atmosphere and occasionally drawing near the fire, where their disgusting peculiarities became hideously apparent, appeared to me who sat in the clearer light of the blaze, as a chorus of imps seen through the mists of a Conjuror’s mirror. I sat and puffed, and enjoyed the scene, saw the excitement becoming “fast & furious”, the muleteers joining in an Arragonese Cagot jota — gradually lost my powers of vision and leaning back, spite of the uproar, was soon fast asleep.

When I awoke, the fire was almost burned down, not a sound was heard but the deep breathing of the muleteers who lay around the fire, enveloped in their montas. None past