ing his vineyard here when the war of 1914 broke
out, and the call to arms sent him from his seclusion to become the
savior of Paris. But when ruins became fashionable in the last decade of
Queen Victoria, it was necessary for St. Raphael to have an ancient
monument. An arch of the aqueduct was imported to the beach with as
little regard for congruous setting as Mr. Croesus-in-Ten-Years shows in
importing an English lawn to his front yard at Long Branch and a gallery
of ancestral portraits to his dining-room on Fifth Avenue.

The Artist looked at the ruins in silence. He tried to gnaw the ends of
his mustache. His eyes changed from amusement to contempt, and then to
interest. I was ready for his question.

"Say, where is this town Frejus?"

The _cocher_ protested. He had bargained to take us to St. Raphael, the
horses were tired, and anyway there was no good hotel, no food, nothing
to do at Frejus.

"Where is Frejus?" repeated the Artist. The _cocher_ pointed his whip
unwillingly westward along the shore. The Artist turned to me with his
famous nose-and-eyes-and-chin-up expression.

"What do you say, _mon vieux_?"

"Decidedly Frejus," I answered.

Accustomed to American queerness, the _cocher_ resigned himself to the
reins for another five kilometers.

Since the River Argens began to flow, it has been depositing silt against
the eastern shore of the Gulf of Frejus, at the point of which stands St
Raphael. Consequently the road, sentineled by linden trees, crosses a
rich plain, and is more than a mile from the sea when it reaches the city
of Julius Caesar. The upper ends of the mole of the ancient port, high
and dry like ships at low tide, join the walls of the canal. You have to
look closely to distinguish the canal and the depression of the basin
into which it widens near the town. For where land has encroached upon
sea, vegetable gardens and orchards have been planted. Inland, the
arches from the aqueduct of the Siagne shed their bricks in wheat fields
and protrude from clumps of hazels. As it enters the city, the road
turns back on itself and mounts to the market-place. The sharp outward
bend of the elevation above the narrow stretch of lowland suggest that
there was a time, long before Roman days, when Frejus, like the towns of
the Corniche de l'Esterel, was built on a promontory.

Frejus belongs to no definite period. It is not Roman, medieval, modern.
It is not a watering-place fashionabl