I always like sailing from Marseilles. Perhaps it is because I have set out from there on so many long and fascinating journeys, but to me it has always been, along with Constantinople and Port Said and Singapore and Panama, a gateway to adventure. On those sparkling blue-and-gold mornings for which the Côte d’Azur is famous I like to sit over my coffee beneath the striped awning of one of the restaurants along the Cannebière and watch the human panorama unroll itself before my eyes. Here one sees picturesque types from the Near, the Middle, and the Farther East; representatives of all of France’s far-flung colonial possessions. The gaunt, stooped man with the yellowed skin and tired eyes, in his buttonhole the red rosette of the Legion d’Honneur, is a colonial administrator, home on a much-needed and all too brief leave of absence from some God-forsaken outpost of empire in Syria, Somaliland, Madagascar, Indo-China. Here is a group of zouaves, boisterous, sun-bronzed fellows in tasseled fezzes and baggy scarlet trousers, fresh from service with the Army of Africa, who ogle every pretty girl they pass and pause for a round of drinks at every café. Tunisian _marchands des tapis_, gaudily colored rugs draped over their shoulders, shuffle along in heelless yellow slippers, urging their wares upon the patrons of the sidewalk restaurants until the exasperated waiters harshly order them away. A trio of bearded, grave-faced men, very dignified and aloof in their white hoods and flowing white burnouses, pace by unhurriedly, concealing their wonder at the unaccustomed scenes behind masks of Oriental imperturbability; they are powerful caïds from one of the Saharan provinces, visiting France for the first time as guests of the Republic. Down the center of the street, under the watchful eye of a grizzled sergeant, briskly marches a platoon of down-at-heel, out-at-elbow nondescripts—recruits for the Foreign Legion, with five years of iron discipline and heartbreaking desert service before them. Sauntering along beside a pretty woman is an officer of chasseurs d’Afrique, a light-opera figure in his flaring scarlet breeches, wasp-waisted sky-blue jacket, and képi piped with gold and silver braid. Staring with childlike curiosity at the displays in the shop-windows are yellow men from Annam, brown men from Tripolitania and the Red Sea countries, black men from the Ivory Coast and Senegal. Hulking negro stevedores rub shoulders with greasy, furtive-eyed seamen from Levantine coasters and Lascar stewards from the P. & O. boats in the harbor. Zigzagging along the pavement, arm in arm, comes a row of rollicking sailors from the fleet, scarlet pompoms on their rakishly tilted caps and the roll of the sea in their gait. And everywhere, seated at the café tables, mingling with the moving throng, are the _filles de joie_, the ladies of easy virtue, bold-eyed and carmine-cheeked, who find in the streets of the great seaport a happy hunting-ground.