For instance, the familiar square in front of the Casino, and the Hotel de Paris, with its lawns and flower-beds, has become an enormous hole, an excavation which looks like a quarry. In a day still distant it will become an underground garage in which the cars of the visitors of the Casino can wait instead of crowding all along the Avenue des Palmiers. The work, which was begun last summer and should have been finished by December, was interrupted by the war. The Casino is open, with Louis Ganne, of "Marche Lorraine" fame, Caruso, and all the other great artists. None of the usual Russian and American customers are seen in the _salles-de-jeu_. When I entered the roulette room the gambling was very slack. There were only eight or nine people round the green table. Three old ladies of the special kind one sees only in the Casinos of the Riviera--blonde wig, wrinkles patiently filled up with pink paint, and a small, sickly dog emerging from a fur-lined bag--were playing very methodically with very small stakes; two Americans were staking high and losing a fair amount; an elderly Englishman of the retired major type was going _en plein_ every now and again after consulting each time a small red-bound book, in which all the _en pleins_ of perhaps twenty years were marked, while a party of Spaniards, evidently new to the green table, were playing irregularly in a foolish way and losing nearly every time. A young French artillery officer, still limping, and with his right arm suspended by a black silk bandage, entered the room, came straight to the table and put two louis on the 14 a second or so before the _rien ne va plus_ was pronounced. The little ball stopped on the 15. A lady who was with the officer excitedly pinched his undamaged arm. "You never listened to me, Jean," she called out. "You forgot the little mark on your left shoulder." Everyone within earshot, the imperturbable croupier included, smiled. The officer himself joined in, and could not help giving some explanation. "My wife," he said, "insisted on putting my money on the number corresponding to the number of my wounds. I have fourteen to speak of, but I did not count a tiny scratch which a bullet made on my left shoulder." Then, addressing his wife: "The next time I come back we will count everything. We'll get an _en plein_ then!" * * * NICE. Though the affluence of foreign people at Nice is, this year, greatly reduced, the population of the town is perhaps higher than when the season is in full swing. Nice has, this year, an unusual class of guests, people who, up to a few months ago, used to think of Nice as a sort of earthly paradise reserved to the plutocracy of the new and old world, and who would never have seen the Côte d'Azur if the war had not chased them from their homes in the east of France and in Belgium.