the blue waves, the
ample horizon seaward, are what make it all so charming.

Biarritz as a watering-place has an all-the-year-round clientele; in
summer the Spanish and the French, succeeded in winter by Americans,
Germans, and English--with a sprinkling of Russians at all times.
Biarritz, like Pau, aside from being a really delightful winter
resort, where one may escape the rigors of murky November to March in
London, is becoming afflicted with a bad case of "sport fever." There
are all kinds of sports, some of them reputable enough in their place,
but the comic-opera fox-hunting which takes place at Pau and Biarritz
is not one of them....

The picturesque "Plage des Basques" lies to the south of the town,
bordered with high cliffs, which in turn are surmounted with terraces
of villas. The charm of it all is incomparable. To the northwest
stretches the limpid horizon of the Bay of Biscay, and to the
south the snowy summits of the Pyrenees, and the adorable bays of
Saint-Jean-de-Luz and Fontarabie, while behind, and to the eastward,
lies the quaint country of the Basques, and the mountain trails into
Spain in all their savage hardiness.

The off-shore translucent waters of the Gulf of Gascony were the
"Sinus Aquitanicus" of the ancients. A colossal rampart of rocks and
sand dunes stretches all the way from the Gironde to the
Bidassoa, without a harbor worthy of the name save at Bayonne and
Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Here the Atlantic waves pound, in time of storm,
with all the fury with which they break upon the rocky coasts of
Brittany further north. Perhaps this would not be so, but for the fact
that the Iberian coast to the southward runs almost at right angles
with that of Gascony. As it is, while the climate is mild, Biarritz
and the other cities on the coasts of the Gulf of Gascony have a fair
proportion of what sailors, the world over, call "rough weather."

The waters of the Gascon Gulf are not always angry; most frequently
they are calm and blue, vivid with a translucence worthy of those of
Capri, and it is this that makes the beach at Biarritz one of the most
popular sea-bathing resorts in France to-day. It is a fashionable
watering-place, but it is also, perhaps, the most beautifully disposed
city to be found in all the round of the European coast line, its
slightly curving slope dominated by a background terrace,
decorative in itself, but delightfully set off with its fringe of
dwelling-houses, hotels, and ca