To tell the truth, Cannes is far more delightful “out of season,” when its gay, idling population of strangers has disappeared, stolen away to the watering-places of the north, there to live the same deadly dull existence, made up of rounds of tea-drinking and croquet-playing, with perhaps an occasional ride in a char-à-banc. Probably the millionaire improves somewhat upon this régime, but there are countless thousands who live this very life in European watering-places--and think they are enjoying themselves. Cannes’s off season is of course summer, but, considering that it is so delightfully and salubriously situated at the water’s edge, and has a summer temperature of but 22° Centigrade, this is difficult to understand. Certainly Cannes is more delightful in the winter months than “_brumeuse Angleterre_,” but then it is equally so in June. Not every one in Cannes speaks English; but for a shopkeeper to prosper to the full he should do so, and so the local “professors” have a busy time of it, in season and out, teaching what they call the “_idiome britannique_” and the “_argot Américaine_.” The shore east and west of the centre of the town is flanked with hotels and villas, and great properties are yearly being cut up and put into the hands of the real-estate agents in order that more of the same sort may be erected where olive and palm trees formerly grew. Horticulture is still a great industry at Cannes, as well as the selling of building-lots, but the marvel is that there is any unoccupied land upon which to raise anything. A dozen years from now how will the horticulturalists of Cannes be able to grow those decorative little orange and palm trees with which Paris and Ostend and London and even Manchester hotel “palm-gardens” are embellished? Cannes has an ecclesiastical shrine of more than ordinary rank, in spite of the fact that it is of no great architectural splendour. It is the old Basilique de Notre Dame d’Espérance which crowns the hill back of the town and possesses a remarkable reliquary of the fifteenth century, said to contain the bones of St. Honorat, the founder of the famous monastery of the Lerin Isles. Another monument of the middle ages is the ancient “Tour Seigneuriale,” erected in 1080 by Adelbert II., an abbot of the Monastery of Lerins. For three hundred years it was in constant use, serving both as a _citadelle_ and as a marine observatory. To-day its functions are no more; but, with the tower of the church, it does form a sort of a beacon, from offshore, for the Cannes boatmen.