The blue restless waves, the jutting capes, and the inlet bays and _calanques_ make charming combinations of land and sea and sky, and repeat the story already told. The route crosses many vine-planted hills and valleys, through short tunnels and around precipitous promontories, but always under the eyes is that divinely beautiful view of the waters of the Mediterranean. The traveller finds no villages, only little hamlets here and there, and innumerable scattered country residences. At Cavalaire the mountains of the Maures become less abrupt, and surround the bay in a low semicircle of foot-hills, quite different from the precipitous “_corniches_” of the Estérel or the mountains beyond Nice. The Baie de Cavalaire has nearly a league of fine sands; not so extensive that they are as yet in demand as an automobile race-track, but fine enough to rank as quite the best of their kind on the whole Mediterranean shore of France. There will never be a resort here which will rival Nice or Cannes; these latter have too great a start; but whatever does grow up here in the way of a watering-place--a railway station and a Café-Restaurant famous for its _bouillabaisse_ have already arrived--will surpass them in many respects. The place has, moreover, according to medical reports, the least contrasting day and night temperature in winter of any of the Mediterranean stations. This would seem cause enough for the founding here of a great resort, but there is nothing of the kind nearer than the little village of Le Lavandou, passed on the road from Bormes, a hamlet whose inhabitants are too few for the makers of guide-books to number, but which already boasts of a Grand Hotel and a Hôtel des Étrangers. At La Croix, just north of the Baie de Cavalaire, has grown up a little winter colony, consisting almost entirely of people from Lyons. It is here that formerly existed some of the most celebrated vineyards in Provence, the plants, it is supposed, being originally brought hither by the Saracens. The sudden breaking upon one’s vision of the ravishing Golfe de St. Tropez, with its bordering fringe of palms, agavas, and rose-laurels, and its wonderful parasol-pines, which nowhere along the Riviera are as beautiful as here, is an experience long to be remembered. The lovely little town of St. Tropez sleeps its life away on the shores of this beautiful bay, quite in idyllic fashion, though it does boast of a Tribunal de Pêche and of a few small craft floating in the gentle ripples of the _darse_, the little harbour enclosed by moles of masonry from the open gulf. Up and down this basin are groups of fine parti-coloured houses, all with a certain well-kept and prosperous air, with nothing of the sordid or base aspect about them, such as one sees on so many watersides. A little square, or _place_, forms an unusual note of life and colour with its central statue of the great sailor, Suffren.