herself still loftily ignored. A warm fracas was in prospect, when a
passing American fortunately cleared up the complication; the woman
would have called in a gendarme unhesitatingly, to enforce her
diminutive claim.

On the bluff, beyond the pavilion, Eugénie's villa, a square, rich
building of English brick, surveys the scene its existence has brought
about. Around us, on the beach, the nurses sit in the shade of the rocks
and discourse on the respective failings of their charges. Children dig
in the sand with pail and shovel, with the same zest as at home.
Child-nature changes little with locality. So recently from the great
unknown, it is not yet seamed and crusted by environment. I suppose that
children fairly represent the prehistoric man. Impulse, appetite,
passion,--all the gusts of the moment sway them. We quell our emotions
so uniformly, as we grow on, that we finally hardly feel their
struggles. The children have richer life than we, in some respects:

"Faith and wonder and the primal earth
Are born into the world with every child."

I make no doubt that Nimrod, or Achilles and Ajax, great children that
they were, as ready to cry as to feast, to laugh as to fight, hunting
mightily, sulking in the tent, or defying the lightning,--intense,
sudden, human all through,--drank down their strong, muddy potion of
existence with a smack far heartier than the reflective sips of life
which civilization has now taught us to take. Childhood is wide and free
and abounding and near to nature, and we can take thoughts from it, and
ponder, perhaps dubiously, on the distance we since have traveled.

The children dig in the sand, and throw it over the nurses, just as they