ately for its inhabitants; and here's the gate of the
garden which leads to the royal palace. La Mortola is a great show
place, for the public are allowed to go in on certain days. I forget if
this is one of them, but perhaps they will let us see the garden,
nevertheless. Shall I ask?"

It was in my mind that, if we stopped, we might miss the Prince as well
as see the garden, so that we should be killing two birds with one
stone, and I was glad when the Countess caught eagerly at the suggestion
that we should beg for a glimpse of La Mortola, a place famed throughout
Europe.

Permission was given; the big iron gates swung open to admit us. We
entered, and a moment later were descending a long flight of stone steps
to terraces far below the level of the road where the car stood waiting
our return.

Had Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the days before his unfortunate
misunderstanding with the Geni and demanded the most beautiful of
gardens, the fulfilment of his wish could have taken no fairer form than
this. Strange, tropical flowers, vivid as flame, burned in green
recesses; water-sprites upset their caskets of pearls over rock-shelves
into translucent pools where lilies lay asleep, dreaming of their own
pale beauty. Long, green pergolas, starred with flowers, framed
blue-veiled pictures of distant coast-line, and mediaeval strongholds,
coloured with the same burnt umber as the hills on which they stood,
gloomed and glowed across a cobalt sea.

There is nothing that pleases the normal male more than to be able to
point out objects worthy of interest or admiration to the female of his
kind. Since time immemorial, have not landscape-pictures in books of
travel been filled in, in the foreground, with the figures of men
showing the scenery to women? Did any one ever see such a work of art
representing a woman as indicating any point of view to a man? No doubt
many could have done so; and the ladies in the pictures had probably
noticed the objects in question before their male escorts pointed to
them; but knowing the amiable weakness of the other sex, they politely
refrained from saying, "Oh, we saw that _long_ ago."

Thus did Terry and I, after the conventional traditions of our species,
lead our little party through avenues of cypresses, to open rock-spaces,
or among a waving sea of roses to battle-grounds of rare cacti, with
writhing arms like octopi transformed into plants.

Here, peering down into a kind of dyke, paved