Only a comparatively few winters ago fashionable Nice consisted almost entirely of the Promenade des Anglais, with a few slight tags and appendages in either direction. At its eastern end stood (and still stands) the Jardin Public, that paradise of children and of be-ribboned French nursemaids, where the band discourses lively music every afternoon at four, and all the world sits round on two-sou chairs to let all the rest of the world see for itself it is still in evidence. These, and the stately quays along the Paillon bank, lined with shops where female human nature can buy all the tastiest and most expensive gewgaws in Europe, constituted the real Nice of the early eighties. But with the rapid growth of that general taste for more sumptuous architecture which marks our age, the Phocæan city woke up a few years since with electric energy to find itself in danger of being left behind by its younger competitors. So the Niçois conscript fathers put their wise heads together, in conclave assembled, and resolved on a general transmogrification of the center of their town. By continuously bridging and vaulting across the almost dry bed of the Paillon torrent they obtained a broad and central site for a new large garden, which now forms the natural focus of the transformed city. On the upper end of this important site they erected a large and handsome casino in the gorgeous style of the Third Republic, all glorious without and within, as the modern Frenchman understands such glory, and provided with a theater, a winter garden, restaurants, cafés, ball-rooms, _petits chevaux_, and all the other most pressing requirements of an advanced civilization. But in doing this they sacrificed by the way the beautiful view towards the mountains behind, which can now only be obtained from the Square Masséna or the Pont Vieux farther up the river. Most visitors to Nice, however, care little for views, and a great deal for the fitful and fearsome joys embodied to their minds in the outward and visible form of a casino.