and strong.—­But to the streets again.  The shops in the upper town are few, chiefly wine-booths and stalls for the sale of salt fish, eggs, and bread, or cobblers’ and tinkers’ ware.  Notwithstanding the darkness of their dwellings, the people have a love of flowers; azaleas lean from their windows, and vines, carefully protected by a sheath of brickwork, climb the six stories, to blossom out into a pergola upon the roof.  Look at that mass of greenery and colours, dimly seen from beneath, with a yellow cat sunning herself upon the parapet!  To reach such a garden and such sunlight who would not mount six stories and thread a labyrinth of passages?  I should prefer a room upon the east side of the town, looking southward to the Molo and the sea, with a sound of water beneath, and a palm soaring up to fan my window with his feathery leaves.

The shrines are little spots of brightness in the gloomy streets.  Madonna with a sword; Christ holding His pierced and bleeding heart; l’Eterno Padre pointing to the dead Son stretched upon His knee; some souls in torment; S. Roch reminding us of old plagues by the spot upon his thigh;—­these are the symbols of the shrines.  Before them stand rows of pots filled with gillyflowers, placed there by pious, simple, praying hands—­by maidens come to tell their sorrows to our Lady rich in sorrow, by old women bent and shrivelled, in hopes of paradise or gratitude for happy days, when Madonna kept Cecchino faithful to his home, or saved the baby from the fever.

Lower down, between the sea and the hill, is the municipal, aristocratic, ecclesiastical quarter of San Remo.  There stands the Palace Borea—­a truly princely pile, built in the last Renaissance style of splendour, with sea-nymphs and dolphins, and satyric heads, half lips, half leafage, round about its doors and windows.  Once it formed the dwelling of a feudal family, but now it is a roomy anthill of a hundred houses, shops, and offices, the Boreas of to-day retaining but a portion of one flat, and making profit of the rest.  There, too, are the barracks and the syndic’s hall; the Jesuits’ school, crowded with boys and girls; the shops for clothes, confectionery, and trinkets; the piazza, with its fountain and tasselled planes, and flowery chestnut-trees, a mass of greenery.  Under these trees the idlers lounge, boys play at leap-frog, men at bowls.  Women in San Remo work all day, but men and boys play for the most part at bowls or toss-penny or leap-frog or morra.  San Siro, the cathedral, stands at one end of the square.  Do not go inside; it has a sickly smell of immemorial incense and garlic, undefinable and horrible.  Far better looks San Siro from the parapet above the torrent.  There you see its irregular half-Gothic outline across a tangle of lemon-trees and olives.  The stream rushes by through high walls, covered with creepers, spanned by ferny bridges, feathered by one or two old tufty palms.  And over all rises the ancient turret of San Siro, like a Spanish giralda,