_auberge_, waiting for an answer from the Prefect of Nice, having been turned back in the same manner since morning. We drove up, and they advised us to send our passports by the postillion, with a letter to the consuls of our respective nations, requesting information, which we did immediately. Nice is three miles from St. Laurent, and as we could not expect an answer for several hours, we amused ourselves with a stroll along the banks of the Var to the Mediterranean. The Sardinian side is bold, and wooded to the tops of the hills very richly. We kept along a mile or more through the vineyards, and returned in time to receive a letter from the American consul, confirming the orders of the commissary, but advising us to return to Antibes, and sail thence for Villa Franca, a lazaretto in the neighborhood of Nice, whence we could enter Italy, after _seven days quarantine_! By this time several travelling-carriages had collected, and all, profiting by our experience, turned back together. We are now at the "Gold Eagle," deliberating. Some have determined to give up their object altogether, but the rest of us sail to-morrow morning in a fishing-boat for the lazaretto. * * * * * LAZARETTO, VILLA FRANCA.--There were but eight of the twenty or thirty travellers stopped at the bridge who thought it worth while to persevere. We are all here in this pest-house, and a motley mixture of nations it is. There are two young Sicilians returning from college to Messina; a Belgian lad of seventeen, just started on his travels; two aristocratic young Frenchmen, very elegant and very ignorant of the world, running down to Italy in their own carriage, to avoid the cholera; a middle-aged surgeon in the British navy, very cool and very gentlemanly; a vulgar Marseilles trader, and myself. We were from seven in the morning till two, getting away from Antibes. Our difficulties during the whole day are such a practical comparison of the freedom of European states and ours, that I may as well detail them.