your London physician. He tears up his rival's prescriptions with
contempt, he reverses the treatment. He sighs as you bid him farewell to
return to advice which is so likely to prove fatal. The London
physician, it is true, hints that though the oracle of the winter resort
is a clever man he is also a quack. But a quack soars into a greatness
beyond criticism when he creates cities and rules hundreds of patients
with his nod.

SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.

V.

SAN REMO.

San Remo, though youngest in date, bids fair to become the most popular
of all the health resorts of the Riviera. At no other point along the
coast is the climate so mild and equable. The rural quiet and repose of
the place form a refreshing contrast with the Brighton-like gaiety of
Nizza or Cannes; even Mentone looks down with an air of fashionable
superiority on a rival almost destitute of promenades, and whose
municipality sighs in vain for a theatre. To the charms of quiet and
sunshine the place adds that of a peculiar beauty. The Apennines rise
like a screen behind the amphitheatre of soft hills that enclose
it--hills soft with olive woods, and dipping down into gardens of lemon
and orange, and vineyards dotted with palms. An isolated spur juts out
from the centre of the semicircle, and from summit to base of it tumbles
the oddest of Italian towns, a strange mass of arches and churches and
steep lanes, rushing down like a stone cataract to the sea. On either
side of the town lie deep ravines, with lemon gardens along their
bottoms, and olives thick along their sides. The olive is the
characteristic tree of San Remo. As late as the sixteenth century the
place was renowned for its palms; a palm tree stands on the civic
escutcheon, and the privilege of supplying the papal chapel with palm
branches in the week before Easter is still possessed by a family of San
Remese. But the palm has wandered off to Bordighera, and the high price
of oil during the early part of this century has given unquestioned
supremacy to the olive. The loss is after all a very little one, for the
palm, picturesque as is its natural effect, assumes any but picturesque
forms when grown for commercial purposes, while the thick masses of the
olive woods form a soft and almost luxurious background to every view of
San Remo.

What strikes one most about the place in an artistic sense is its
singular completeness. It lies perfectly shut in by the circle of
mountains, the