How gay and odd and foolish and delightful it was to unsophisticated Ermengarde! The narrow, foreign streets, palms closing their vistas, great hotels, in gardens glowing with gorgeous exotics and flowers, breaking their lines here and there; the warm deep purple of the sea barring every side street on one hand; the picturesque old Italian town climbing the wooded hill-spur and cresting it with its tower on the other; and the great mountain amphitheatre stretching far up beyond that, with bare peaks, violet-veined, crystalline, drawn clear and sharp on the deep, clear, velvety sky; the motley crowd of mad masks and dominos, cheaply gaudy, childishly absurd, helplessly gay; the rippling laughter and confused babble of local dialect and foreign tongues on the liquid air; the droll family parties, transparently disguised, even the babies, in coloured calico; the trim little mountain soldiers, bright-eyed and smiling, keeping the streets; the hawkers of toys, sacks of confetti, and endless paper coils; the vendors of strange local pastry and sweets on little standings; the look of expectant enjoyment on every face, especially the broad and business-like bourgeois countenance; the atmosphere of spontaneous gaiety, sunshine, and enjoyment, all went to English Ermengarde's head. Old life-long artificial restraints gave way; the joy of life sprang up; she could almost have taken hands and danced with the maskers dancing along the street. The eternal child, dormant in us all, was awake and happy in her. It was not the show, that was poor and disappointing, all its cheap and tawdry vanities blotting the pure beauty of atmosphere and setting, that gave this new vivid sense of unconstrained gladness. Perhaps she had never seen people madly, spontaneously, and yet decorously gay before. The Carnival folk were all, young and old, rich and poor, merry and not wise and bent upon being merry and not wise, and yet they were not in the least ashamed or conscious of any cause for shame. Even some Americans, a people never young but aged and biases from their cradles, snatched a brief hour of long-deferred childhood, and a few self-conscious Britons, their gloomy national pride concealed in dominos, condescended to diversions that in their own personality they scorned as only fit for foreigners and fools. No wonder that the sparkling sunny sea-air and atmosphere of infectious enjoyment dissipated light-hearted Ermengarde's insular self-consciousness, and she suddenly discovered that there is more enjoyment in life than is commonly supposed. What was the mad tune band after band kept playing as the huge cars, grotesquely laden, filed slowly past; it was jingly and poor, but so crazily full of headlong mirth--La Mattschiche? Long afterwards it gave her a pleasant thrill to hear it shouted by street boys, thumped on pianos and street organs, and blared on brass bands. It was "full of the warm South" for her.