confectioner's, and a tobacco-store,--each presided over by a buxom
French matron, affable and vigilant, and clearly the animating spirit of
the establishment.


Tiny carriages of a peculiar species, with donkeys and boy drivers, line
the streets. The carriage holds one,--say an infirm dowager seeking the
afternoon breeze,--and if the driver's attendance is desired, he is able
to run beside it for miles. It is light and noiseless, comfortably
cushioned, always within call, and governed by a beneficently trifling
tariff. These _vinaigrettes_, as they are called, would be appreciated
at home, if habit took kindly to novelties. How greatly they might
simplify problems of calling and shopping! Our conveyances are all
cumbrous. We must have the huge barouche, the coach, the close-shut
coupé. Even the phaeton yields to the high T-cart. But convention is
autocratic, and would frown on these vinaigrettes as it frowns on many
useful ideas. Another unfortunate victim of its taboo is the
sedan-chair, which would be lustily stared at to-day, yet the utility of
which might be made positively inestimable. One who reads of the Chinese
palanquins, or sees the carrying-chairs of Switzerland, convenient and
always in demand, or who watches these agile little vinaigrettes darting
along the ways, wonders that similar devices do not force their way, if
need be, into universal favor.

Another mode of conveyance, once peculiarly popular with Biarritz, might
be more difficult of exportation. This was the _promenade en cacolet_.
The town of Bayonne is but five miles distant, by a delightful road, and
formerly, particularly before the railroad came in, to ridicule old
ways, every one went to Bayonne _en cacolet_. It is no longer so, and
the world has lost a unique custom. The contrivance was very simple: the