sinos. Ostend is superbly laid out,
but it is dreary; Monte Carlo is beautiful, but it is ultra; while
Trouville is constrained and affected. Biarritz has the best features
of all these.... Saint-Jean-de-Luz had a population of ten thousand
two centuries ago; to-day it has three thousand, and most of these
take in boarders, or in one way or another cater to the hordes of
visitors who have made it--or would, if they could have supprest its
quiet Basque charm of coloring and character--a little Brighton.

Not all is lost, but four hundred houses were razed in the
mid-eighteenth century by a tempest, and the stable population began
to creep away; only with recent years an influx of strangers has
arrived for a week's or a month's stay to take their places--if idling
butterflies of fashion or imaginary invalids can really take the place
of a hardworking, industrious colony of fishermen, who thought no more
of sailing away to the South Antarctic or the banks of Newfoundland in
an eighty-ton whaler than they did of seining sardines from a shallop
in the Gulf of Gascony at their doors.

DOWN THE SAONE TO LYONS[A]

[Footnote A: From "Pencillings by the Way." Published by Charles
Scribner, 1852.]

BY NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS

The Saone is about the size of the Mohawk, but not half so beautiful;
at least for the greater part of its course. Indeed, you can hardly
compare American with European rivers, for the charm is of another
description, quite. With us it is nature only, here it is almost
all art. Our rivers are lovely, because the outline of the shore is
graceful, and particularly because the vegetation is luxuriant. The
hills are green, the foliage deep and lavish, the rocks grown over
with vines or moss, the mountains in the distance covered with pines
and other forest-trees; everything is wild, and nothing looks bare or
sterile. The rivers of France are crowned on every height with ruins,
and in the bosom of every valley lies a cluster of picturesque stone
cottages; but the fields are naked, and there are no trees; the
mountains are barren and brown, and everything looks as if the
dwellings had been deserted by the people, and nature had at the same
time gone to decay.

I can conceive nothing more melancholy than the views upon the Saone,
seen, as I saw them, tho vegetation is out everywhere, and the banks
should be beautiful if ever. As we approached Lyons the river narrowed
and grew bolder, and the last ten