It is
a charming old town, far more charming than the stranger who never has
time to walk into it from the station can imagine, and there is a
palm-bordered avenue leading from the railway to the sea, with the shops
and cafes of Italy on one side and the shops and cafes of France on the
other. So late as six o'clock in the evening those cafes and shops
preserved a reciprocal integrity which I could not praise too highly,
but after dark there must be a ghostly interchange of forbidden
commodities among them which no force of customs officers could wholly
suppress. At any rate, I should have liked to see them try it, though I
should not have liked to be kept in Ventimiglia overnight for any less
reason; it seemed a lonesome place, though mighty picturesque, with old
walls, and a magnificent old fort toward the sea, and a fine bridge
spanning, though for the moment superfluously spanning, the perfectly
dry bed of a river.
I wished to ask what the name of the river was, but out of all the files
of people coming and going I chose an aged man who could not tell me; he
excused himself with real regret on the ground that he was a stranger in
those parts.
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