orange trees with their
golden globes surrounded a spurting fountain, while, rising from the
depths of a great garden below--a garden pertaining to a villa built
like a Moorish mosque--were the tall spires of cypresses and the yellow
clouds of mimosa trees. In this hermitage, which seemed, under southern
moons, to open on a world like that of _The Arabian Nights_, I remained
for about two months, and wrote there the later portions of my book _Is
Life Worth Living?_ Social life at Cannes had all the charm and none of
the constant unrest of London, and its atmosphere so enchanted me that I
spent for many years the best part of my winters on the Riviera, though
I subsequently varied my program by a month or so at Pau or Biarritz,
and more than once at Florence. On later occasions, of which I shall
speak hereafter, I went farther afield, and saw something of what life
was like in an old Hungarian castle; in the half-Gothic dwellings and
arcaded courts of Cyprus; in the drawing-rooms of Fifth Avenue; and
also on the shores of Lake Michigan, along which the great esplanade of
Chicago now extends itself for more than eleven miles.

Of my experiences in foreign countries, just as of those in Scotland, I
shall have to speak again; but I will first return to those portions of
my early life which, with the exception of an annual few months in
London, I spent for the most part on the Riviera, in Italy, or in
Devonshire, or in country visits at houses such as those which I have
just mentioned, and I will record what, beneath the surface, my life and
my mental purposes in these often-changed scenes were.

CHAPTER IX

FROM COUNTRY HOUSES TO POLITICS

First Treatise on Politics--Radical Propaganda--First Visit to
the Highlands--The Author Asked to Stand for a Scotch
Constituency

The sketches which I have just given of my purely social experiences may
seem, so far as they go, to represent a life which, since the production
of _The New Republic_, was mainly a life of idleness. I may, however,
say, without immodesty, that, if taken as a whole, it was the very
reverse of this. Whether the results of my industry may prove to have
any value or not, nobody could in reality have been more industrious
than myself, or have prosecuted his industry on more coherent lines.

I have already given some account of _The New Republic_, indicating its
character, its construction, the mood which gave rise to it, and the
moral