Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. ! There is a terrace in Dorade, fenced in from every wind that blows except the south, and even that has to creep cautiously and cunningly round a sharp corner to make its entrance good. Four small stunted palms grow there; they look painfully out of place, and conscious of it; for they are always bowing their heads in a meek humiliation, and shiver in a strange unhealthy way at the slightest breeze, just as you may see Asiatics doing in our "land of mist and snow." But the natives regard those unhappy exotics with a fanatical pride, pointing them out to all comers as living witnesses to the perfection of the climate; they would gladly stone any irreverent stranger who should suggest a comparison between their sacred shrubs and the giants of Indian seas. The only inhabitant of the place who ever attained any eminence anywhere (he really was a good tailor), bequeathed a certain sum for the beautifying of the renowned alle'e, instead of endowing charitable institutions, and his townsmen endorsed the act by erecting a little mural tablet to commemorate his public spirit. The view is rather pretty, stretching over vineyards, and gardens, and olive grounds down to the shore, Sword and Gown. 2 with the islands in the far foreground rearing themselves against the sky, clear and blue, or if the weather is misty to seaward, sleeping in an aureole of golden haze; so that the whole effect would be cheerful if it were not for the melancholy invalids who haunt the spot perpetually. Paces and figures are to be seen, sometimes, that would send an uncomfortable shiver of revulsion through you if you met them on the Boulevard des Italiens, strengthened by your anteprandian absinthe. Here, the place belonged to them so completely, that a man in rude health felt like an u...