But everything has a pleasing air of anticipation.  Since we are to be out of the season at all, we are glad we are in advance of it.  This is the youth of the summer, not its old age.  People are looking forward; events are approaching, instead of receding; the coming months seem big with indefinite promise of benefit and pleasure.

We quickly become imbued with the general hopefulness of the place.  Every one has the look of one making ready.  You hear, all day long, when far enough from the waves, a vague, joyous hum of bustle pervading the town.  The enterprising click of hammer or trowel falls constantly on the ear.  The masons are at work upon the new villas, and our hotel is completing a fine addition for a cafe; the stores along the busy little main street are being put in order, the windows alluringly stocked, and bright awnings unrolled above them, fenders from the summer’s heat.  The hotels are fairly awake.  Everything is rejoicing that the semi-hibernation is over.

[Illustration:  Relief map of the central Pyrenees]

Biarritz, the town, is as delightful, if not as picturesque, as we had hoped.  Perhaps it is too modern to be picturesque.  In this part of the world at least, one rather requires the picturesque to be allied with the old.  The nucleus of Biarritz is old, but that is out of sight in the modern overgrowth; Biarritz, as it is, is of this half century.

This is not, on the whole, to be regretted.  Biarritz has no history, no past of associations, no landmarks to be guarded.  Vandalism in the form of the modern rebuilder can here work more good than harm.  Save for its location at the edge of the wild Basque country, and what it has seen, itself sheltered by obscurity, of the forays of that restless people, the place has little to tell.  It is a watering-place, pure and simple, buoyed entirely by the prospering ebb and flow of modern fashion.  Let us take it as of to-day, not of yesterday, content to seek its charms under that aspect alone, enjoying it for itself, not for its pedigree.

Biarritz is a prerogative instance of the magnetism of royalty,—­of the social power of the court as an institution.  It was a watering-place, in a small way, before Eugenie’s advent; but there was not a tithe of its present size and popularity.  In 1840, it numbered in all not more than fifty houses, a few of them lodgings or humble cafes, but the greater part staid little whitewashed summer-dwellings with green verandas and occasional roof-balconies; set down irregularly, without street or system, along the sunny slopes of the bluff.  Murray’s Handbook for 1848 gives it passing notice, and disrespectfully styles it the dullest place upon earth for one having no resources of friends upon the spot.  But in the modern edition of forty years later, the same manual has come to describe the place in a very different strain; assigns it a population of nearly 6,000; details, with respect, its fashionable rank, its villas and increasing hotels, its graded streets and driveways; and among other things adds the simple remark that “about twenty-one thousand strangers now visit Biarritz every year.”  Evidently there has been some advance within the span.