You may step into a tram-car at the Casino out of a crowd of painted women, sporting men, Jews, semi-invalids, respectable tourists, and disreputable sharpers from every capital in Europe, and from some in Africa and America, and in five minutes find yourself in an impossible fairy region of tranquil beauty--a town that is partly Italian and partly dream-magic, scantily peopled by priests, nuns, lay-sisters in various garb and wide-winged cap, orphanage children, Monagask soldiers, a few peasant folk leaning from roof-gardens and loggias in narrow, silent streets, and a sprinkling of humble bourgeois in the recesses of small dark shops, selling humble necessaries that nobody seems to want. Sometimes a procession of richly vestured priests, and acolytes with candles and swinging censers, slowly traverses the empty ways. The silence is so deep you can almost hear it. Every vista is closed by pines, through the deep-green boughs and ruddy stems of which glows that glorious deep-blue sea under a sky of paler blue. And what a road it is that leads to the still city, winding round and up the steep rock, upon which she sits superb above the waters, a rock hung with rich-hued tapestry of geranium, cactus, rose, and even our old friend the homely blackberry, transformed by the wizardry of the winter sun into splendour of crimson and golden arras. Very few steps past the dazzling new cathedral, that rises snow white above the quiet streets, lead you by a short turn into those strange gardens, that are really enchanted woods of olive, palm, and pine, with glorious flowers for undergrowth, cresting the sheer, sea-fronting steep of rock, down the face of which flowers, gorgeous creepers and hanging plants overflow to the white-combed breakers beneath. Thence the Armida gardens and glaringly vulgar Monte Carlo Casino gleam idealized in frames of olive foliage and pine-boughs, and all the beauty of the vast sweep of coast in its amphitheatre of circling mountains. Nightingale song throbs quick and rich above the deep murmur of surging wave and sighing pine-top, always providing you go at the right time; bees hum and the ring of a sail running down a mast with the wash of steam vessels and motors is faintly heard through the clear and sunny air. You may go back from this fairy land to the racket and worldliness of Monte Carlo through the strange vegetable diablerie and Arabian Nights' charm of the Casino gardens and their surrounding and intermingling shops and restaurants, and enjoy a still more striking contrast in the simple act of taking a seat in what Germans call a go-chair--Fahr-stuhl.