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. In the morning we saw that the waters arranged
themselves in the rainbow colors of such a scarf round the shores, and
that there were only pleasure-craft moored in them: the yacht of the
Prince of Monaco and the yacht of some American Prince, whose title I
did not ascertain, but whose flag was unmistakable.
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