These prettily situated Gardens are well worth a visit, if only for the magnificent views obtainable from them. They can be reached from Nice by excellent electric tram-cars having first and second class compartments. (Why are tram-cars so very much better abroad than in England?) Close by the Gardens is the fine Excelsior Regina Hotel, where our late Queen Victoria used to stay. The rooms in the hotel should be visited on the way back from the Gardens; an excellent lunch can be had there, for the cooking is truly first-rate. The Zoological Gardens were founded by the late Comte de Lagrange, a great traveller and naturalist, who died in 1893 at Singapore, at the early age of thirty-six. His widow, the Comtesse de Lagrange, is now sole proprietress and directress. The entrance fee is one franc, and one franc for a carriage; the latter fee can be saved by alighting at the entrance and simply walking in on foot. The Gardens are of small extent, and the whole of the animals and birds can be seen in a very short time. As at Marseilles, I experienced the most shocking weather at Cimiez, and the first day not a ray of sun shone, whilst a shower of rain almost gutted my camera. There is a nice collection of lions at this Zoo, and they form quite the greatest attraction of the place. The old mother, which is to be seen in a cage close by a large tiger, has produced three litters of young, all of which are now to be seen in the Gardens. The father of these lions died at the age of seventeen. The children of this pair comprise two lions three and a half years old, three lions two and a half years old, and three lions fourteen months old. All these eight animals are extraordinarily tame and healthy-looking. I was enabled to stand right up against the cages, without the slightest fear of getting mauled, in order to photograph them. One of the oldest lions allowed me to stroke him; and when I put my face up against the bars, he at once licked it with his rough tongue--a perfect feline kiss. I was perfectly charmed with these lions, and was quite loth to leave them. In another set of cages was a common leopard, and the invariably savage black variety, with its beautiful yellow eyes and snarling jaws. It is a curious fact that these black leopards are nearly always savage. There were two brown bears and a polar bear in pits opposite the young lions, and a poor old brown bear, totally blind, in a pit by himself. There was a very handsome old ‘black buck’ from India, with a younger one much lighter in colour. It was comical to watch them at play, butting at each other with their horns. It is often extremely difficult to photograph these creatures in confinement, because they are so tame. This sounds odd, but the difficulty lies in the fact that the animals, expecting to be fed, will insist on coming close up to you to the bars, and utterly refuse to go away, in spite of shouts, hisses, showers of stones, and prods with umbrellas.