e or unfashionable, a manufacturing
town prosperous or struggling, a port bustling or sleepy, a
fishing-village or a flower-gathering center. Frejus suggests no marked
racial characteristics in architecture or inhabitants. It is neither
distinctly Midi nor distinctly Italian--as those terms are understood by
travelers. Frejus is unique among the cities of the Cote d'Azur because
it has no unmistakable _cachet_. Frejus suggests Rome, the Middle Ages,
the twentieth century. Frejus embraces pleasure-seeking, industries,
fish, flowers, and soldiering. Mermaids, delightfully reminiscent of the
Lido and Abbazia in garb, dive from the end of the mole into a safe
swimming-pool; children of the proletariat in coarse black _tabliers_,
who have not left sandals and white socks on the beach behind them, fish
for crabs; naval aviators start hydroplanes from an aerodrome beside the
Roman amphitheater; fishermen, of olive Mediterranean complexion, dry
copper-tinted nets on the beach, laying them, despite the scolding of the
Senegalese guards, upon piles of granite and cement blocks with which
laborers are building a new pier.

We had come to the beach for an after-luncheon smoke, and when we were
not looking at the Senegalese and workmen, our eyes wandered from
hydroplanes and machine-gun-armed motor-boats to the mermaids on the
Roman mole. Not till we ran out of tobacco and the mole ran out of
mermaids did we realize that Frejus was still unexplored and unsketched.
We gave ourselves a six o'clock rendezvous on the beach. The Artist
started to seek Roman ruins, while I turned towards the market-place,
cathedral bound. Sea-level villas came first, and then a quarter of
sixteenth-century houses, many of which showed on the ground floor
medieval foundations. In two places I got back to the Romans. A cross
section of thin flat bricks with generous interstices of cement in the
front wall of a greengrocer's opposite, indicated the line of the Roman
fortification. Walking around the next parallel street, I managed to get
into a garden where a long piece of the wall remained.

I came out to the St. Raphael carriage road at a corner where arose a
huge square tower of the Norman period. Almost to its crumbling top,
houses had been built against it on two sides. The angle formed by the
alley through which I came and the main street had fortunately kept the
other two sides clear. The tower was the home of a wine and coal
merchant,