To Escarene twelve miles: the first four skirt along the beautiful valley at whose mouth Nice stands, following, and sometimes crossing, the course of the river Poglion; the rest gradually winds up into the heart of the mountains, through deep ravines and woods of gigantic olives, which in this district become picturesque forest-trees. We breakfasted at Escarene, a quiet pretty village, possessing tolerable accommodation. To Sospello fifteen miles of good road, the first seven or eight of which ascend the lofty wall of mountain which closes up the entrance of the valley, and appears at a distance like a score of corkscrews laid in a Vandyke figure. Up the whole of this we walked, mounting, by an easy but tedious circuit of good road, a long series of crags, and courses of torrents, and sometimes looking almost perpendicularly down upon the point which we had passed half an hour ago. Nothing can be more bare or desolate than the rocky mountain ridge in which this ascent terminates, and on which vegetation seems at its last gasp. A dance of Satyrs might be appropriately introduced to complete the wildness of a sketch from this spot, but that it does not afford a single berry or blade of grass to regale them, even if they could live like their cousins the goats. A large family of peasants, as wild and merry as these "hairy sylvans," accompanied us up the mountain with their cattle, on their way to the summer chalets, exhibiting the laughing side of human nature in a manner which it is delightful to witness in the poor. "Pleased with a feather, tickled with a straw," and grateful for the slightest civility, they seemed to consider the mere change of place as a festival. The wife had twitched off her husband's cocked hat, which she wore in frolic; the bare-legged children appeared ready to dance to their own voices as they walked; and the very infant, committed in his cradle to the entire discretion of the family donkey, was equally pleased and satisfied with his own situation, as he headed the patriarchal cavalcade. The view of the Mediterranean and the coast of France, which this point commands, is prodigious; and the intermediate ranges of mountains which shut out Nice, and which appeared elevated peaks when seen from its citadel, seem from this spot only masses of wavy ground. From hence a descent much steeper than the ascent and almost equally long, conducted us into the rich and well-inhabited valley in which Sospello stands. The inn at this place is rather below mediocrity; the mistress sturdy and rapacious in her demands, and shameless in retracting them when forced to do so.