This wonderful modern town, with its stately sea-front, its noble quays, its dainty white villas, its magnificent hotels, and its Casino, owes its existence entirely to the vogue which the coast has acquired in our own times as a health-resort for consumptives. As long ago as Smollett's time, the author of "Roderick Random" remarks complacently that an acquaintance, "understanding I intended to winter in the South of France, strongly recommended the climate of Nice in Provence, which indeed I had often heard extolled," as well he might have done. But in those days visitors had to live in the narrow and dirty streets of the Italian town, whose picturesqueness itself can hardly atone for their unwholesome air and their unsavory odors. It was not till the hard winters of 1822-23-24 that a few kind-hearted English residents, anxious to find work for the starving poor, began the construction of a sea-road beyond the Paillon, which still bears the name of the Promenade des Anglais. Nice may well commemorate their deed to this day, for to them she owes as a watering-place her very existence. [Illustration] The western suburb, thus pushed beyond the bed of the boundary torrent, has gradually grown in wealth and prosperity till it now represents the actual living Nice of the tourist and the winter resident. But how to describe that gay and beautiful city; that vast agglomeration of villas, _pensions_, hotels, and clubs; that endless array of sun-worshipers gathered together to this temple of the sun from all the four quarters of the habitable globe? The sea-front consists of the Promenade des Anglais itself, which stretches in an unbroken line of white and glittering houses, most of them tasteless, but all splendid and all opulent, from the old bank of the Paillon to its sister torrent, the Magnan, some two miles away. On one side the villas front the shore with their fantastic façades; on the other side a walk, overshadowed with date-palms and purple-flowering judas-trees, lines the steep shingle beach of the tideless sea.