death no less than eight hundred persons on the ground of sorcery. "He
tells us that the devils and malignant spirits banished from Japan and
the Indies took refuge here in the mountains of Labourd. Above all, he
asserts that the young girls of Biarritz, always celebrated for their
beauty, 'have in their left eye a mark impressed by the devil.'"

Happily we have no devil in this nineteenth century, and in the clear
glance of these Biarritz peasants loitering on the sands, we find that
his brand-marks have disappeared with him.

A few of the faces we meet are English; many are Spanish, and show that
Biarritz draws its worshipers from the South as from the North. Indeed,
a large proportion of its summer society wears the mantilla and wields
the fan. Other marks, too, of Spanish dress are here, as where little
girls in many-hued outfit romp along the sands, dragooned by dark-faced
nurses in true Iberian costume. Three or four brilliant red parasols add
amazingly to the general effect of the scene.

We repair to the stone parapet before the pavilion, and gravely paying
our dues for chairs, sit and watch the picture. There is no charge for
sitting on the beach, but this is severely frowned upon at Biarritz. The
dues are two sous per chair, and, with true Continental thrift, they are
always rigorously collected. Whether one wanders into the open square of
the Palais Royal at Paris, or listens to the music in the Place de
Tourny at Bordeaux, or watches the waves at Biarritz, the old woman with
her little black bag at once appears upon the scene. Some Frenchless
friends in Paris, on one occasion, guilelessly seated in the gardens of
the Palais Royal, took the collector simply for a pertinacious
beggar-woman, and waved her airily off. She returned to the charge, of
course, in indignant French, and grew angrier every moment as she found