Early in the morning we continued our journey to Nice. The country is not picturesque, and the roads are very rough and badly kept. Towards sunset we approached the French frontier _Portou-Cerbère_ and soon perceived a corner of the Mediterranean, lighted by a silver moon. It was very cold in our compartment, and the foot-warmers had to be changed several times during the night. We did not stop at Marseilles and went straight on to Nice, having decided to spend a few days on the Riviera. There were two Frenchmen in our compartment going to gamble at Monte Carlo, who studied systems on a little roulette board. One of them descended at a station to buy a newspaper, whilst his friend slept on peacefully, nodding his head, in a corner of the carriage, and didn’t come back when the train had started. I was watching wickedly the awakening of our fellow-passenger, to see the expression of his face when he would find out that his friend was not there. Suddenly waking out of his nap he opened his eyes very wide and fixed them upon us suspiciously. Did he think perhaps that we had pitched his companion out of the window? At the next stoppage both friends were reunited. The belated passenger, as it appears, had just time to jump in the next carriage when the train was moving. CHAPTER XLV SAN REMO We only remained ten days at Nice, for we were at the end of October, the season of gusty winds and showers. The weather was abominable, and we had to remain indoors all day. So we started for San Remo, where my husband’s brother had settled with his family for the whole winter. The “Villa Maria,” which they were to inhabit, was not ready yet to receive them, and they had to put up in the meanwhile at the “Quisisana,” a boarding-house kept by an old German lady. The society offered by the few tenants of the “Quisisana” was not of a specially enlivening description. There was an English spinster lady on whom wooers had turned their backs long ago, dried up in celibacy, who never was kissed, I am sure, for with such a thin body you might get a bruise in coming in contact with her. She was a blue-stocking in the bargain, and read Homer in Greek; a crushingly superior person who made other people feel ignorant. I was becoming intolerably tired of her superior culture and stopped her every time she began any long sentences. There was another British lady, who was a very different sort of person, her tongue being the only sharp thing in her whole stout person. What she lacked in height was amply made up in width: whichever way you put her down she’d roll. After dinner she regaled us with songs which she cooed raising her eyes to the ceiling, at which I had to make the greatest effort to keep serious. She was awfully sentimental, and when she turned her eyes upon me with so melting an expression that I thought she was going to kiss me, I precipitately fled. The third boarder was a consumptive German student, frightfully pale and