It Was Not Quite Dark When
We Arrived At Monte Carlo And Began To Experience, In The Beautiful
Keeping Of The Place, How Admirably A Gambling-House Can Manage The
Affairs Of A Principality When It Pays All The Taxes.
There were many
two-horse landaus waiting our pleasure outside the station, and the
horses were all so robust and handsome that we were not put to our usual
painful endeavor in seeking the best and getting the worst.
All those
stately equipages were good, and the one that fell to us mounted the
hill to our hotel by a grade so insinuating that the balkiest horse in
Frascati could hardly have suspected it.
In our easy ascent we were aware of the gray-and-blond houses behind
their walls among their groves and gardens, among flowers and blossoms;
of the varying inclines and levels from which some lovely difference of
prospect appeared at every step; of the admirably tended roadways, and
the walks that followed them up hill and down, and crossed to little
parks, or led to streets brilliant with shops and hotels, clustering
about the great gambling-house, the centre of the common prosperity and
animation. The air had softened with the setting sun, and the weather
which had at Leghorn and Genoa delayed through two weeks of rain and
cold, seemed to confess the control of the Casino administration, as
everything else does at Monte Carlo, and promised an amiability to which
we eargerly trusted.
It was of course warmer out-doors than in-doors, and while the fire was
kindling on our hearth we gave the quarter hour before dinner to looking
over our garden-wall into the comely town in the valley below, and to
the palace and capital of the Prince of Monaco on the heights beyond.
Nothing by day or by night could be more exquisite than the little
harbor, a perfect horseshoe in shape, and now, at our first sight of it,
set round with electric lights, like diamonds in the scarf-pin of some
sporty Titan, or perhaps of Hercules Mon-oecus himself, who is said to
have founded Monaco.
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