If you are lucky enough to enter Marseilles for the first time by the Old Port, you find yourself at once in the very thick of all that is most characteristic and vivid and local in the busy city. That little oblong basin, shut in on its outer side by projecting hills, was indeed the making of the great town. Of course the Old Port is now utterly insufficient for the modern wants of a first-class harbor; yet it still survives, not only as a historical relic but as a living reality, thronged even to-day with the crowded ships of all nations. On the quay you may see the entire varied Mediterranean world in congress assembled. Here Greeks from Athens and Levantines from Smyrna jostle cheek by jowl with Italians from Genoa and Arabs or Moors from Tangier or Tunis. All costumes and all manners are admissible. The crowd is always excited, and always animated. A babel of tongues greets your ears as you land, in which the true Marseillais dialect of the Provençal holds the chief place--a graceful language, wherein the predominant Latin element has not even yet wholly got rid of certain underlying traces of Hellenic origin. Bright color, din, life, movement: in a moment the traveller from a northern climate recognizes the patent fact that he has reached a new world--that vivid, impetuous, eager southern world, which has its center to-day on the Provençal seaboard. [Illustration] Go a yard or two farther into the crowded Cannebière, and the difference between this and the chilly North will at each step be forced even more strikingly upon you. That famous thoroughfare is firmly believed by every good son of old Marseilles to be, in the familiar local phrase, "la plus belle rue de l'univers." My own acquaintance with the precincts of the universe being somewhat limited (I have never travelled myself, indeed, beyond the narrow bounds of our own solar system), I should be loth to endorse too literally and unreservedly this sweeping commendation of the Marseillais mind; but as regards our modest little planet at least, I certainly know no other street within my own experience (save Broadway, New York) that has quite so much life and variety in it as the Cannebière. It is not long, to be sure, but it is broad and airy, and from morning till night its spacious _trottoirs_ are continually crowded by such a surging throng of cosmopolitan humanity as you will hardly find elsewhere on this side of Alexandria. For cosmopolitanism is the true key-note of Marseilles, and the Cannebière is a road that leads in one direction straight to Paris, but opens in the other direction full upon Algiers and Italy, upon Egypt and India.