There is no mistaking the character of the next day.  It is “settled fair.”  Probably Nature feels that she carried affairs a trifle too far yesterday.  Everything is radiant, this morning; the leaves on the trees glow and are tremulous in this warm southern air.  Eaux Bonnes appears to better advantage than at our rainy arrival.  I cross the street to the diminutive park, which is triangular, its apex northward.  It has paths and seats and leafy Gothic arches, fountains and a music kiosque; while in and about are promenaders, nurses and children, guides and idlers, already out of doors for sunbaths or business.  The town mainly centres about this triangle, the houses facing it from across the streets in a similar triangle proportionately larger.  The buildings are tall and uniformly handsome; other hotels resembling the Princes line the western side and the base, and opposite are diversified shops and pensions and still more hotels.  Livery-stables are omnipresent, the sign, "chevaux et voitures a louer," greeting one at every turn.  Along the sides of the streets flow lively rivulets of water, led in from the mountain slopes and fresh and clear from their clean, rocky ways.  The spring-house and Casino, a decorated structure, built against the mountain, stands on a low eminence west of the head of the park, and from this to our hotel extends a broad foot-way, lined with stalls and booths, “where bright-colored Spanish wools, trinkets and toys are sold, where bagatelle and tir au pistolet, roundabouts and peepshows,—­all the ‘fun of the fair,’ in fact,—­is set out for the amusement of idle Eaux Bonnes.”  These are sure indications of fashionable prosperity.  Wherever these evanescent summer stalls appear, at Saratoga or St. Moritz or Eaux Bonnes, they tell of patronage to call them into being,—­an idle, prosperous patronage that spends for gimcracks what the native would economize from necessaries.

Behind all, walling the square closely in on almost every side, are the cliffs; at the east is a lower curtain of rock shutting off the outer valley; and on the south, almost overhanging us, shoots up the Pic de Ger.  The view of its rocky escarpments and silver peak may fairly be called stupendous, it is so sharply at variance with the smooth carpetings of the lower mountains about it.

I pass down through the park.  At its base is a congress of single-seated donkey-carriages like those at Biarritz.  They are officered by importunate though good-natured boys and women, but I persevere in unruffled declinations.  The street slants up a short hill here and comes out upon another open place much smaller than the park and likewise bordered with stores and pensions.