A few of the faces we meet are English; many are Spanish, and show that Biarritz draws its worshipers from the South as from the North.  Indeed, a large proportion of its summer society wears the mantilla and wields the fan.  Other marks, too, of Spanish dress are here, as where little girls in many-hued outfit romp along the sands, dragooned by dark-faced nurses in true Iberian costume.  Three or four brilliant red parasols add amazingly to the general effect of the scene.

We repair to the stone parapet before the pavilion, and gravely paying our dues for chairs, sit and watch the picture.  There is no charge for sitting on the beach, but this is severely frowned upon at Biarritz.  The dues are two sous per chair, and, with true Continental thrift, they are always rigorously collected.  Whether one wanders into the open square of the Palais Royal at Paris, or listens to the music in the Place de Tourny at Bordeaux, or watches the waves at Biarritz, the old woman with her little black bag at once appears upon the scene.  Some Frenchless friends in Paris, on one occasion, guilelessly seated in the gardens of the Palais Royal, took the collector simply for a pertinacious beggar-woman, and waved her airily off.  She returned to the charge, of course, in indignant French, and grew angrier every moment as she found herself still loftily ignored.  A warm fracas was in prospect, when a passing American fortunately cleared up the complication; the woman would have called in a gendarme unhesitatingly, to enforce her diminutive claim.

On the bluff, beyond the pavilion, Eugenie’s villa, a square, rich building of English brick, surveys the scene its existence has brought about.  Around us, on the beach, the nurses sit in the shade of the rocks and discourse on the respective failings of their charges.  Children dig in the sand with pail and shovel, with the same zest as at home.  Child-nature changes little with locality.  So recently from the great unknown, it is not yet seamed and crusted by environment.  I suppose that children fairly represent the prehistoric man.  Impulse, appetite, passion,—­all the gusts of the moment sway them.  We quell our emotions so uniformly, as we grow on, that we finally hardly feel their struggles.  The children have richer life than we, in some respects: 

  “Faith and wonder and the primal earth
  Are born into the world with every child.”

I make no doubt that Nimrod, or Achilles and Ajax, great children that they were, as ready to cry as to feast, to laugh as to fight, hunting mightily, sulking in the tent, or defying the lightning,—­intense, sudden, human all through,—­drank down their strong, muddy potion of existence with a smack far heartier than the reflective sips of life which civilization has now taught us to take.  Childhood is wide and free and abounding and near to nature, and we can take thoughts from it, and ponder, perhaps dubiously, on the distance we since have traveled.