u would have declared it to be the sirens singing, and it would
have been found necessary to lash you to the mast. But there were no
masts to lash you to in Yellowsands--and of the sirens it is not yet
time to speak.

It was the golden end of afternoon as the coach stopped in front of the
main hotel, The Golden Fortune; and for the benefit of any with not too
long purses who shall hereafter light on Yellowsands, and be alarmed at
the name and the marble magnificence of that delightful hotel, I may
say that the charges there were surprisingly "reasonable," owing to one
other wise provision of the young lord and master of that happy place,
who had had the wit to realise that the nicest and brightest and
prettiest people were often the poorest. Yellowsands, therefore, was
carried on much like a club, to which you had only to be the right sort
of person to belong. I was relieved to find that the hotel people
evidently considered me the right sort of person, and didn't take me
for a Sunday-school treat,--for presently I found myself in a charming
little corner bedroom, whence I could survey the whole extent of the
little colony of pleasure. The Golden Fortune was curiously situated,
perched at the extreme sea-end of a little horse-shoe bay hollowed out
between two headlands, the points of which approached each other so
closely that the river Sly had but a few yards of rocky channel through
which to pour itself into the sea. The Golden Fortune, therefore,
backed by towering woodlands, looked out to sea at one side, across to
the breakwater headland on another, and on its land side commanded a
complete view of the gay little haven, with its white houses built
terrace on terrace upon its wooded slopes, connected by flights of
zigzag steps, by which the apparently inaccessible shelves and
platforms circulated their gay life down to the gay heart of the
place,--the circular boulevard, exquisitely leafy and cool, where one
found the great casino and the open-air theatre, the exquisite
orchestra, into which only the mellowest brass and the subtlest strings
were admitted, and the Cafe du Ciel, charmingly situated among the
trees, where the boulevard became a bridge, for a moment, at the mouth
of the river Sly. Here one might gaze up the green rocky defile through
which the Sly made pebbly music, and through which wound romantic walks
and natural galleries, where far inland you might wander

"From dewy dawn to dewy night,
An