the Riviera.

We were afoot (the best way to travel and see things) on an April Sunday,
and stopped for lunch at the restaurant opposite the Cagnes railway
station. The Artist was not hungry. While I ate he went out "to find
what sort of a subject the _ensemble_ of the city on the hill over there
makes." He returned in time for cheese and fruit, with a sketch of
Cagnes that made the waitress run inside to get better apples and
bananas. She insisted that we would be rewarded for a climb up to the
old town, and offered to keep our coats and kits.

Along the railway and tramway and motor-road a modern Cagnes of villas
and hotels and pensions, with their accompaniment of shops and humbler
habitations, has grown for a mile or more, and stretched out across the
railway to the sea. Two famous French artists live here, and many
Parisians and foreigners. There is also a wireless station. All this
shuts off from the road the town on the hill. Unless you had seen it
from the open country, before coming into the modern Cagnes, you would
not have known that there was a hill and an old city. It was not easy
for us to find the way.

Built for legs and nothing else, the thoroughfare up through Cagnes is a
street that can be called straight and steep and stiff, the adjectives
coming to you without your seeking for alliteration, just as
instinctively as you take off your hat and out your handkerchief.

"No livery stable in this town--come five francs on it," said the Artist.

"Against five francs that there are no men with a waistline exceeding
forty-five inches!" I answered, feelingly and knowingly.

But we soon became so fascinated by our transition from the twentieth
century to the fifteenth that we forgot we were climbing. Effort is a
matter of mental attitude. Nothing in the world is hard when you are
interested in doing it.

Half way and half an hour up, we paused to take our bearings. The line
of houses, each leaning on its next lower neighbor, was broken here by a
high garden wall, from which creepers were overhanging the street, with
their fresh spring tendrils waving and curling above our heads. There
was an odor of honeysuckle and orange-blossoms, and the blood-red branch
of a judas-tree pushed its way through the green and yellow. The canyon
of the street, widening below us, ended in a rich meadowland, dotted with
villas and trees. Beyond, the Mediterranean rose to the horizon. While
the Artist was "tak