gallery hung with Renaissance tapestry, all in freshness of colour. The sea
deep blue and green like a peacock's neck, the mountains pale yellow, as
shown in tapestry, with blue shadows; the silvery-grey olives, the glossy
orange trees with their fruit--exactly as in tapestry. Surely the old
weavers of those wondrous webs studied this coast and copied it in their
looms.

I have said that the sea was like a peacock's neck; but it had a brilliancy
above even that. As I have mentioned tapestry I may say that it resembled
a sort of tapestry that is very rare and costly, of which I have seen a
sample in a private collection at Frankfort, and another in the Palazzo
Bardini at Florence. It consists of the threads being drawn over plates of
gold and silver. In the piece at Florence the effect of the sun shining
through a tree is thus produced by gold leaf under the broidery of
tree-leaves. Silver leaf is employed for water, with blue silk drawn in
lines over it. So with the sea. There seemed to be silver burnished to its
greatest polish below, over which the water was drawn as a blue lacquer.

And Nice. What shall I say of that bright and laughing city--with its
shops of flowers, its avenues of trees through which run the streets, its
gardens, its pines and cactus and aloe walks? Only one blemish can I pick
out in Nice, and that is a hideous modern Gothic church, Notre Dame, filled
with detestable garish glass, so utterly faulty in design, so full of
blemish of every sort, that the best wish one could make for the good
people of Nice is that the next earthquake that visits the Riviera may
shake this wretched structure to pieces, so as to give them an opportunity
of erecting another in its place which is not a monstrosity.

The Avenue de la Gare is planted with the eucalyptus, that has attained
a considerable size. It is not a beautiful tree, its leaves are ever on