Such sketches of the country houses that have been known to me might be very easily multiplied--houses of which, whenever I think of them, memories come back to me like the voices of evening rooks. But these will be sufficient, so far as England and Ireland are concerned, to illustrate certain portions of my life other than that of London, and I will for the moment turn from those portions to others, which were spent by me for many years not at home, but abroad.
Not long after my Oxford career was ended, a family with which I was closely connected was, in consequence of the illness of one of its members, advised by doctors to pass the winter at Cannes, and, as soon as my friends were settled there, I was asked to go out and join them. A diminutive villa next to their own was secured for me. Its windows opened on an equally diminutive garden, in which orange trees with their golden globes surrounded a spurting fountain, while, rising from the depths of a great garden below--a garden pertaining to a villa built like a Moorish mosque--were the tall spires of cypresses and the yellow clouds of mimosa trees. In this hermitage, which seemed, under southern moons, to open on a world like that of _The Arabian Nights_, I remained for about two months, and wrote there the later portions of my book _Is Life Worth Living?_ Social life at Cannes had all the charm and none of the constant unrest of London, and its atmosphere so enchanted me that I spent for many years the best part of my winters on the Riviera, though I subsequently varied my program by a month or so at Pau or Biarritz, and more than once at Florence. On later occasions, of which I shall speak hereafter, I went farther afield, and saw something of what life was like in an old Hungarian castle; in the half-Gothic dwellings and arcaded courts of Cyprus; in the drawing-rooms of Fifth Avenue; and also on the shores of Lake Michigan, along which the great esplanade of Chicago now extends itself for more than eleven miles.
Of my experiences in foreign countries, just as of those in Scotland, I shall have to speak again; but I will first return to those portions of my early life which, with the exception of an annual few months in London, I spent for the most part on the Riviera, in Italy, or in Devonshire, or in country visits at houses such as those which I have just mentioned, and I will record what, beneath the surface, my life and my mental purposes in these often-changed scenes were.