The Bond of Black by William Le Queux

When the winter rains made London dreary, rendering the Strand a veritable quagmire, and when the shops began to display Christmas cards and Christmas numbers, I went South, as I did each year, accompanied by my married sister and her husband, in search of sunshine. I knew the Riviera well. I had enjoyed the rather dull exclusiveness of Cannes; I had stayed one season at the Grand at Nice and capered through Carnival in a clown's dress of mauve and green; I had spent a fortnight once in Mentone, that paradise of the consumptive; and I had paid some lengthy bills at the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo. My brother-in-law, however, had taken a little white villa on the olive-clad hillside at Beaulieu, which we found was on the verge of everything.

But to me life on the Riviera soon becomes tiresome. A couple or three visits to "the Rooms; " a "five o'clock" or two at La Reserve; tea in a wicker chair in the entrance-hall of that colossal hotel, the Excelsior, at Cimiez, which is patronised by Her Majesty; a dinner at the London House at Nice, and one at the Hermitage at "Monty," and I become tired of the ever-azure sea, of the Noah's Ark gardens, of the artificiality and of the constant brightness of the Riviera "season. " I long for my old English home in the country where, in the springtime, all the beauties of the outdoor world come to one with a sense of novelty after the winter's cold and frost.