thern
winters to the shelter of the Riviera is ready to greet in the
homeliest Carnival the incoming of spring. His first months of exile
have probably been months of a little disappointment. He is far from
having found the perpetual sunshine which poets and guide-books led him
to hope for. He has shivered at Christmas just as he shivered at home,
he has had his days of snowfall and his weeks of rain. If he is
thoroughly British, he has growled and grumbled, and written to expose
"the humbug of the sunny South" in the _Times_; if he is patient, he has
jotted down day after day in his diary, and found a cold sort of
statistical comfort in the discovery that the sunny days after all
outnumbered the gloomy ones. The worst winter of the Riviera, he is
willing to admit, would be a very mild winter at home, but still, after
each concession to one's diary and common sense, there remains a latent
feeling of disappointment and deception.

But Carnival sweeps all this feeling away with the coming of the spring.
From the opening of February week follows week in a monotony of warm
sunshine. Day after day there is the same cloudless cope of blue
overhead, the same marvellous colour in the sea, the same blaze of
roses in the gardens, the same scent of violets in every lazy breath of
air that wanders down from the hills. Every almond-tree is a mass of
white bloom. The narcissus has found a rival along the terraces in the
anemone, and already the wild tulip is preparing to dispute the palm of
supremacy with both. It is the time for picnics, for excursions, for
donkey-rides, for dreams beneath the clump of cypresses that shoot up
black into the sky, for siestas beneath the olives. It is wonderful what
a prodigious rush of peace and good temper follows on the first rush of
spring. The very doctors of the winter resort shake hands with one
another, the sermons of the chaplain lose their frost-bitten savour and
die down into something like charity, scandal and tittle-tattle go to
sleep in the sunshine. The stolid, impassive English nature blooms into
a life strangely unlike its own. Papas forget their _Times_. Mammas
forget their propriety. The stout British merchant finds himself astride
of a donkey, and exchanging good-humoured badinage with the labourers in
the olive-terraces. The Dorcas of Exeter Hall leaves her tracts at home,
and passes without a groan the pictured Madonna on every wall. Carnival
comes, and completes the wreck of the