ization of the principality,
everybody will wish to seem French, but after you break through the
surface, the natives will be as comfortably and endearingly Italian as
anybody in the peninsula. Among themselves they speak a Ligurian patois,
but with the stranger they will use an Italian easily much better than
his, and also much better than their own French. I think they prefer you
in their racial parlance after you have shown some knowledge of it, and
two kind women of whom I asked my way in Monte Carlo, one day when I was
trying for the station of the funicular to Turbia, grew more volubly
kind when I asked it in such Tuscan as I could command. That station is
really not hard to find when once you know where it is, and at three
o'clock in the afternoon I was mounting the precipitous incline of the
alp on whose summit Augustus divided Italy from Gaul, and left the
stupendous trophy which one sees there in ruins to-day.

I should like to render the sense of my upward progress dramatic by
pretending that we mounted from a zone of flowers at Monte Carlo into
regions where only the hardiest blossoms greeted us, but what I really
noticed was that by-and-by the little patches of vineyard seemed to grow
less and the olive-trees scraggier. Perhaps even this was partly fancy;
as for the flowers, I cannot bring myself to partake of their deceit;
for they are the most shameless fakers, as regards climate, in nature.
It is, for instance, perfectly true that they are in bloom along the
Riviera all winter long, but this does not prove that the winter of the
Riviera is always warm. It merely proves that flowers can stand a degree
of cold that nips the nose bent to hale their perfume, and brings tears
into the eyes dwelling in rapture on their loveliness. They are like
women; they look so fragile and delicate that you think they cannot
stand anything, but they can stand pretty much everything, or at least
everything they wish to. Throughout that week at Monte Carlo, while we
cowered round our fires or went out into a frigid sunshine, the flowers
smiled from every garden-ground in a gayety emulous of that of their
sisters passing in white serge. So probably I gave less attention to the
details of the scenery through which my funicular was passing than to
the stupendous prospects of sea and shore which it varyingly commanded.
If words could paint these I should not spare the words, but when I
recall them, my richest treasure of adjective