horizontal column, blinding our wretched invalid
in a moment, and in the same moment covering
every object in the apartment, chairs, tables,
eatables, if there happen to be any about, with
a penitential garment of dust and ashes. Nor
is it smoke alone which is thus forced into the
room; volleys of sparks and embers fly out of
the fireplace as well, and you find yourself
without warning in a perfect "chamber of
horrors," and with your eyes full of irrepressible
and bitter tears. And the storm once begun in
this terrible fashion, the hurricane will continue
to blow, the smoke to pour down the chimney,
the chimney-boards, if there is no fire, to be
driven into the rooms, the doors to rattle, and
the outside blinds to flap, for a dozen hours at
a stretch.

These winds are known doubtless at Mentone
as at Nice; but at the former place the storms
are of shorter duration, and the dust is less
overwhelming. Mentone is a wonderfully sheltered
place. It is situated in a bay, and partially
surrounded by a ring of mountains, which
fortify it against some of the fiercer winds very
completely.

There can be no doubt that this health station,
as one may venture to call it, is blessed with a
rarely beautiful and genial climate. That you
have unpleasant weather to encounter at Mentone
in the course of the winter and spring
months, is a thing about which there can, as a
matter of course, be no doubt. You have occasional
fierce winds, you have comparatively cold
days, and you have a fair share of rain, but you
have no winter. You have autumn and spring,
and you must encounter some of the inclemency
which belongs to both those seasons, and expect
it; but the intermediate link — the ice-link —
which, in our northern climates, holds the
autumn and the spring together in bitter union,
is wanting. All through that grim period,
between November and March, inclusive, you
are blessed with abundant sunshine. It is
broken at intervals sometimes for four or five
days together — though this very rarely indeed
— by cloudy or rainy weather, but the sunny
days come back, and sunshine is the rule here,
and not, as with us in the winter, rare exception.
There is, indeed, hardly a month in the year
when you may not need to put up an umbrella
to protect you from the force of the sun's rays.

This excessive power of the sun during the
winter months is one of the peculiarities of the
climate in these regions, and is said to be fraught
with some amount of danger to persons in delicate
health. It is dangerous for this reason:
that the contrast between the sunshine and the
shade is so great, that the passage from the one
to the other is apt to give a deadly chill to those
who make such a transition too suddenly. It
is a wonderful sun that shines on these shores
of the Mediterranean. It is scorching, and
seems to have a kind of sting in it that almost
gives you pain. The shade, on the other hand,
is in its way equally remarkable. There is a
sort of blue-black chill about it that makes you
shudder. If you have to pass under the shadow
of a row of houses in the course of your walk,
you compare the sunlit road on this side of it
where you are standing, and on the other side
of it to which you are going, and quail at the
idea of the chilly space between. It is not
possible to exaggerate this difference between
sunshine and shade at Mentone. When the
sunset takes place here, that same chill comes
on in an instant. In fact, the shade has it all
its own way then, and the medical authorities
assure their patients that this is a moment when
they should all be in doors. But, taking it
even at its worst, it must still be admitted that
the winter climate of .Mentone is one of extraordinary
clemency. It is a port for wrecked
humanity to put into. There is safe anchorage
to be found in this harbour of refuge, and
every facility for the executing of repairs.
There are cases known of very battered wrecks
putting in here with scarcely a spar standing;
but which, after remaining in port some time,
and being diligently patched and mended up,
have actually been able to stand out to sea
again, and able to encounter rough weather
without damage. For the most part, however,
the vessels which put in here to refit go out
only capable of sailing in smoothest seas and in
fair weather, and even then are obliged to
return to port very often, to go through a
course of repairs. Let us be grateful that such
harbours of refuge exist!

The beauty of the country round Mentone,
and close about it too, is something wonderful.
The Maritime Alps surrounding the bay on the
shore of which the little town is built, all sorts
of gorges and ravines give access to these mountains
and to the hill-country beyond. On the
sides of the hills and in the valleys are plantations
of orange and lemon trees, on terraces
raised one over the other, and on the lower
ground, and where the shelter is the greatest,
you can wander among the groves of olive-trees,
wondering as you pass along at the grey indistinct
mystery which seems to gather about
and beneath them. These olive groves are
ghostly places. Underneath the trees, which
grow here to a great height, there lies, when they
are planted thickly, a strange filmy shadow, in
which the tree-trunks and all other objects show
like spectral appearances rather than realities,
so faint and unreal do they appear. In that dim.
shade, too, the gnarled and twisted arms of an
occasional fig-tree planted here and there, and
bare of leaves, writhe like fantastic snakes, and
seem to threaten you as you walk beneath them.
Such places, lying low in the valleys, with the
mountains girding them about, remind one
continually of the wood where Dante wandered,
where the wolf came out from his lair to meet
him, and where Virgilio's pale figure moved
ghostly among the ghostly trees.

And often, as the year advances and the
spring "comes slowly up," you chance upon
some lonely spot still in the olive shade, where,
unnurtured by any human hand, and altogether
uncared for and forgotten, the red anemones
blaze forth in fullest beauty. As you come