In Troubador-Land | Page 9

him to a young lady whom he admired, then in the
same pension.
No evil comes without a counterbalancing good. The day I was
detained in Florence by that tailor, and the loss of the night train at
Genoa were not immense evils. A furious gale broke over the coast,
and when at seven in the morning we steamed out of Genoa, the
Mediterranean was sullen, the rain poured down, and the mountains
were enveloped in vapour. But as we proceeded along the coast the
weather improved, and before long every cloud was gone, the sky
became blue as a gentian, and the oranges flamed in the sunshine as we
swept between the orchards. Had I gone by the noon train from
Florence I should have travelled this road by night, had I caught the
3.27 A.M. train I should have seen nothing for storm and cloud.
And--what a glorious, what an unrivalled road that is! It was like
passing through a gallery hung with Rénaissance tapestry, all in
freshness of colour. The sea deep blue and green like a peacock's neck,
the mountains pale yellow, as shown in tapestry, with blue shadows;
the silvery-grey olives, the glossy orange trees with their fruit--exactly
as in tapestry. Surely the old weavers of those wondrous webs studied
this coast and copied it in their looms.
I have said that the sea was like a peacock's neck; but it had a brilliancy
above even that. As I have mentioned tapestry I may say that it
resembled a sort of tapestry that is very rare and costly, of which I have
seen a sample in a private collection at Frankfort, and another in the
Palazzo Bardini at Florence. It consists of the threads being drawn over
plates of gold and silver. In the piece at Florence the effect of the sun
shining through a tree is thus produced by gold leaf under the broidery
of tree-leaves. Silver leaf is employed for water, with blue silk drawn in
lines over it. So with the sea. There seemed to be silver burnished to its
greatest polish below, over which the water was drawn as a blue
lacquer.

And Nice. What shall I say of that bright and laughing city--with its
shops of flowers, its avenues of trees through which run the streets, its
gardens, its pines and cactus and aloe walks? Only one blemish can I
pick out in Nice, and that is a hideous modern Gothic church, Notre
Dame, filled with detestable garish glass, so utterly faulty in design, so
full of blemish of every sort, that the best wish one could make for the
good people of Nice is that the next earthquake that visits the Riviera
may shake this wretched structure to pieces, so as to give them an
opportunity of erecting another in its place which is not a monstrosity.
The Avenue de la Gare is planted with the eucalyptus, that has attained
a considerable size. It is not a beautiful tree, its leaves are ever on the
droop, as though the tree were unhealthy or unhappy, sulky at being
transplanted to Europe, dissatisfied with the climate, displeased with
the soil, discontented with its associates. It struck me as very much like
a good number of excellent and very useful souls with whom I am
acquainted, who never take a cheerful view of life, are always
fault-finding, hole-picking, worry-discovering, eminently good in their
place as febrifuges, but not calculated to brighten their neighbourhood.
What a delightful walk is that on the cliff of the château! The day I was
at Nice was the 9th of April. The crags were rich with colour, the
cytisus waving its golden hair, the pelargonium blazing scarlet, beds of
white stock wafting fragrance, violets scrambling over every soft bank
of deep earth exhaling fragrance; roses, not many in flower, but their
young leaves in masses of claret-red; wherever a ledge allowed it, there
pansies of velvety blue and black and brown had been planted. In a hot
sun I climbed the château cliff to where the water, conveyed to the
summit, dribbled and dropped, or squirted and splashed, nourishing
countless fronds of fern and beds of moss, and many a bog plant. The
cedars and umbrella pines in the spring sun exhaled their aromatic
breath, and the flowering birch rained down its yellow dust over one
from its swaying catkins.
I see I have spoken of the cytisus. I may be excused mentioning an
anecdote that the sight of this plant provokes in my mind every spring.
I had a gardener--a queer, cantankerous creature, who never saw a joke,

even when he made one. "Please, sir," he said to me with a solemn face,
"I've been rearing a lot o' young citizens for you."
"Have you?" said I, with