noonday. To be sure, it is midwinter, and yet in the sunshine I found
myself uncomfortably warm, but in the shade the air was like the touch of
death itself. I do not like the climate.

There are a great number of public places in Marseilles, several of
which are adorned with statues or fountains, or triumphal arches or
columns, and set out with trees, and otherwise furnished as a kind of
drawing-rooms, where the populace may meet together and gossip. I never
before heard from human lips anything like this bustle and babble, this
thousand-fold talk which you hear all round about you in the crowd of a
public square; so entirely different is it from the dulness of a crowd in
England, where, as a rule, everybody is silent, and hardly half a dozen
monosyllables will come from the lips of a thousand people. In
Marseilles, on the contrary, a stream of unbroken talk seems to bubble
from the lips of every individual. A great many interesting scenes take
place in these squares. From the window of our hotel (which looked into
the Place Royale) I saw a juggler displaying his art to a crowd, who
stood in a regular square about him, none pretending to press nearer than
the prescribed limit. While the juggler wrought his miracles his wife
supplied him with his magic materials out of a box; and when the
exhibition was over she packed up the white cloth with which his table
was covered, together with cups, cards, balls, and whatever else, and
they took their departure.

I have been struck with the idle curiosity, and, at the same time, the
courtesy and kindness of the populace of Marseilles, and I meant to
exemplify it by recording how Miss S------ and I attracted their notice,
and became the centre of a crowd of at least fifty of them while doing no
more remarkable thing than settling with a cab-driver. But really this
pitch and swell is getting too bad, and I shall go to bed, as the best