At night from Roccabruna you may see the flaring gas-lamps of the gaming-house at Monaco, that Armida’s garden of the nineteenth century.  It is the sunniest and most sheltered spot of all the coast.  Long ago Lucan said of Monaco, ’Non Corus in illum jus habet aut Zephyrus;’ winter never comes to nip its tangled cactuses, and aloes, and geraniums.  The air swoons with the scent of lemon-groves; tall palm-trees wave their graceful branches by the shore; music of the softest and the loudest swells from the palace; cool corridors and sunny seats stand ready for the noontide heat or evening calm; without, are olive-gardens, green and fresh and full of flowers.  But the witch herself holds her high court and never-ending festival of sin in the painted banquet-halls and among the green tables.

Let us leave this scene and turn with the country-folk of Roccabruna to S. Michael’s Church at Mentone.  High above the sea it stands, and from its open doors you look across the mountains with their olive-trees.  Inside the church is a seething mass of country-folk and townspeople, mostly women, and these almost all old, but picturesque beyond description; kerchiefs of every colour, wrinkles of every shape and depth, skins of every tone of brown and yellow, voices of every gruffness, shrillness, strength, and weakness.  Wherever an empty corner can be found, it is soon filled by tottering babies and mischievous children.  The country-women come with their large dangling earrings of thin gold, wearing pink tulips or lemon-buds in their black hair.  A low buzz of gossiping and mutual recognition keeps the air alive.  The whole service seems a holiday—­a general enjoyment of gala dresses and friendly greetings, very different from the silence, immobility, and noli me tangere aspect of an English congregation.  Over all drones, rattles, snores, and shrieks the organ; wailing, querulous, asthmatic, incomplete, its everlasting nasal chant—­always beginning, never ending, through a range of two or three notes ground into one monotony.  The voices of the congregation rise and sink above it.  These southern people, like the Arabs, the Apulians, and the Spaniards, seem to find their music in a hurdy-gurdy swell of sound.  The other day we met a little girl, walking and spinning, and singing all the while, whose song was just another version of this chant.  It has a discontented plaintive wail, as if it came from some vast age, and were a cousin of primeval winds.

At first sight, by the side of Mentone, San Remo is sadly prosaic.  The valleys seem to sprawl, and the universal olives are monotonously grey upon their thick clay soil.  Yet the wealth of flowers in the fat earth is wonderful.  One might fancy oneself in a weedy farm flower-bed invaded by stray oats and beans and cabbages and garlic from the kitchen-garden.  The country does not suggest a single Greek idea.  It has no form or outline—­no barren peaks, no spare and difficult vegetation.  The beauty is rich but tame—­valleys green with oats and corn, blossoming cherry-trees, and sweet bean-fields, figs coming into leaf, and arrowy bay-trees by the side of sparkling streams:  here and there a broken aqueduct or rainbow bridge hung with maidenhair and briar and clematis and sarsaparilla.