while the masked inmates pelt and get pelted in turn with comfits made of painted clay.  The Corso is also the scene of numerous religious processions, some of which are quaint and picturesque.  There are a number of ancient confraternities established amongst the trades-people of Nice, who wear costumes of, red, white, black and blue serge, according to the guild they belong to.  This sack-like garment covers them from head to foot, face and all, there being only two eyeholes slit in the mask to permit the wearer to see out.  These brotherhoods attend the sick, bury the dead and take care of the widows and orphans, and in Holy Week make the narrow streets of the old city delightful to the artistic eye by the bright mass of their vivid-colored raiment, the flickering of their tapers, and the gigantic crucifixes of gold and silver they carry in procession from church to church.  Every morning there is a market held on the Corso of fruits, vegetables and flowers.  Such magnificent baskets of camellias, japonicas and roses, such nosegays of violets and orange-blossoms, can be seen, I fancy, nowhere but at Nice.  Here also the peasant-women sometimes bring immense pots of Peruvian aloes for sale, whose snowy blossoms are scented like those of the magnolia, and rise in gigantic pyramids of magnificent cup-shaped flowers.  They are plants to salute respectfully as you pass by them, such is their size and dignity.  In Holy Week women are to be seen all over the old town selling plaited palm branches of a pale straw-color, some of which are bedecked with little bows of ribbon or stars of tinsel, used in the ceremonies of Palm Sunday.  The peasant-girls who come to market at Nice are rather handsome, but as dark as Nubians, with almond-shaped eyes and long, coarse black hair, which they wear plaited into tails bound round the head with broad velvet ribbons, like a coronet.  On the top of this headgear they sport a wide-brimmed straw hat of peculiar shape, ornamented with little black crosses made of narrow velvet.  In Princess Marie Lichtenstein’s Holland House there is a portrait of Lady Augusta Holland wearing one of these Nice hats.

But it is time for us to cross the bridges and pay our respects to Nice the “new.”  When I first visited Nice in 1856 at least two-thirds of this part of the city were not in existence.  There were no splendid railway-stations then; only one or two, instead of twenty, monster hotels; the Promenade des Anglais only extended about a mile along the shore, instead of four; and there were but one quay and two bridges.  Now superb quays line the river on either side, and there are six bridges, and Heaven only knows how many churches for the accommodation of all the denominations imaginable and unimaginable, from Pere Lavigne’s very beautiful and very orthodox church, in which Monsignor Capel has preached in Lent, down to Leon Pilate’s, where collections are made for the evangelical missions presided over by Mrs. Gould and W.C.  Van Metre.  There