With little in the way of public amusement or general intercourse, Mentone and its neighbourhood offer some subjects of interesting inquiry. If employment does not come readily to hand, it may possibly be evoked by looking about. The medieval old town; the character and habits of the people; excursions on foot or donkey to the mountainous region, with its decayed castles and sun-baked villages perched thousands of feet above the sea-level; the picturesque sea-coast, with its caverns and traditions of Saracenic invasion; the mouldering tokens of Roman sway—all will yield matter for agreeable exploration. Turbia and Monaco should be deliberately seen, if not already visited; and so likewise should Ventimiglia and Bordighera—the latter for the sake of its palm-trees. I am sorry to say there is no handy local guide-book, affording that minute explicitness of detail expected from works of this nature. The native topographers write prettily, and even poetically, of the surrounding district; a guide-book, however, is not bought for fine writing, but, like an almanac, is looked to for plain trustworthy facts. The best of the books of the kind is entitled a _Guide des Etrangers à Menton_, by M. Pessy; it comprehends a good map, which is at all events indispensable. In the prevailing state of things, the explorer will have to rely greatly on his own powers of investigation, assisted, if it happily may be, by friends well acquainted with this outlying part of the Alpes Maritimes. The ever present, and often noisy Mediterranean can scarcely fail to suggest historic recollections. Around it were clustered all the great nations of antiquity. It is the sea of the Bible, that on which Paul encountered misadventures. It is the sea which the Crusaders had to cross in their delirious expeditions to the Holy Land. Now, in comparison to the great oceans of modern discovery, it is only a salt-water lake, yet rich in the legends which undyingly hover about it. Physically considered, it is curious. Barred out by the Strait of Gibraltar, the tidal wave of the Atlantic operates but feebly on the Mediterranean. Residents at Mentone recognise little difference in the height to which the water flows on the beach. The sea may be twice a day a few inches higher or lower; but except in the case of winds affecting it somewhere, and causing it to dash high up on the shore, it has a monotonous uniformity of appearance. The beach consists of rounded stones and gravel, not agreeable for being walked on, and on that species of gray shingle the waves are everlastingly surging. Sometimes in the calmest days and nights, its roar is most outrageous and trying to the nerves. Suddenly, when level as a pond, it will assume an angry aspect, with white breakers in the distance. In short, it is very whimsical and incomprehensible in its varying moods; and those who dislike its more placid or its more uproarious proceedings had better live away from its shores.