steep climb, and we were not rewarded by any fine view, as the clouds were lying low on the mountains. Coming down again, as we swung round one of the sharp turns of the zigzag road, the pole of the carriage came out. Happily the horses, apparently accustomed to such a mishap, stopped almost of their own accord, and we replaced the pole, I holding it in position while the driver drove it home with a large stone. This was our only accident, though we afterwards drove, I should say, nearly two hundred miles before we left the island. The Corsican horses are miracles of endurance. Cowhocked, half-starved weeds to look at, apparently lacking both in strength and stamina, these animals, when put to the test, seemed all muscle and whip-cord. Though very small fourteen hands would be above the averagethey tugged away at the lumbering old diligences in the gamest way, and with only an ordinary light open carriage be hind them would, without being unduly distressed, do their thirty to forty miles a day for a week together. Given fine weather-which an English In respect, too, of the position their womenkind appear to occupy in the social ménage (please understand I am not citing this as a virtue), the Corsicans seem to approximate in their ideas to the noble savage. See a peasant and his wife coming into market. She will be walking along loaded with a large basket on her arm, and probably another on her head, heavy with produce of farm and garden, while he will have only his pipe in his mouth and his gun slung over his shoul-man always regards as much his right, der; and, indeed, should his means per- when once on the Continent, as if it had mit, will probably be riding a pony or been included in the bargain when he mule. Very picturesque fellows some of purchased his Cook's ticket in Piccadilly them look, with their broad-brimmed hats - there is no pleasanter method of proand hot-looking suits of black or brown gression than driving in an open carriage, velveteen. I am bound to say we did oc- especially when, as in Corsica, you have casionally meet couples with the above the most excellent government roads. I respective positions reversed; but these am not exaggerating when I say I have we put down as lovers or honeymoon never seen roads in England or Scotland couples. The women, if they do ride, so perfectly made or so perfectly kept, ride after the fashion of Miss Bird or an though I understand their capabilities are Indian squaw, i.e., on both sides of the severely tried at certain times of the year, horse, as I have seen it expressed. when heavy timber is brought down in large quantities from the interior to the coast. Judging from his language and appear ance, you would say that the Corsican would assimilate more readily with Italy than France. A gentleman who spoke Italian well, told me that after a few days' conversation with the natives he could easily understand their language. As a matter of fact, the Corsicans dislike Italians. Events have proved stronger than race affinities, and the accident of Napoleon having been born in Ajaccio seems to be in itself sufficient to identify Corsica with France. Our first drive in Corsica might easily have proved our last. We drove along a road winding up and round the hill at the back of the town, through an olive wood, to a very commonplace looking spring called the fountain of Salario. It was a In time, doubtless, the temptation, apparently irresistible to so many, to do as much as possible of a country in the shortest time will drive people more and more to the railways. At present, how. ever, the railway company, by running only two trains a day and those at the most inconvenient of times, and at the slowest possible pace, are disinterestedly avoiding competition with the carriage traffic as much as possible. The only line at present in operation is a single one, projected across the island from Ajaccio to Bastia. Unfortunately, owing to a serious error in the engineer's calculations, there is at present a gap of about twenty. six miles between Bocognano and Corté, over the pass of Vizzavona, which is filled | however, usual on a Corsican railway. In up by a diligence service.* These vehicles are of the most antiquated description, built, I should say, before the tax on glass was abolished; so small were the apertures to let in the much needed light and air amongst perhaps six or eight closely packed odoriferous natives. We never travelled in one of these ramshackle conveyances. I believe they were cheap; I am sure they were nasty. A tunnel two and a half miles long is to carry the railway under the pass of Vizzavona, and just before we landed the engineer had made the discovery that his two tunnels from either end were not going to meet in the middle. Failure is not so fatal as success, so he did not, I believe, as did the poor engineer of the St. Gothard tunnel, drop dead at the supreme moment of disappointment. The gauge is a very narrow one, barely more than three feet; and the small, very bright blue, yellow, and claret-colored carriages quite reminded one of those in the nursery at home. The two daily trains run, as I mentioned, at most unseasonable hours; the 5 A.M. speaks for itself; the 5 P.M. from Ajaccio lands you between seven and eight at Bocognano, where you choose between staying the night at a dirty-looking wine shop, or travelling on by diligence through the night another fifteen or thirty miles to Vivario or Corté. Rather than get up at half past four in the morning, we elected to drive in a private carriage through to Corté, about fifty miles, staying the night at Vivario. We started soon after eight, and were not a little surprised, while bowling comfortably along the road parallel with the line, to be overtaken at nine o'clock, when scarcely eight miles on our journey, by the 5 A.M. from Ajaccio. At first we thought it must be a special; but no, it was the ordinary train. Could there, then, be anything of the nature of a Corsican Derby Day, or an Easter Monday review, to cause such a dislocation of the traffic, or do passengers wait at the terminus, as do visitors to the Tower, until the party is sufficiently large to be personally conducted? No; neither hypothesis was tenable, for there were only three people in the whole train. We sought an explanation from our driver. "Oh, it is nothing," said he. "On change le temps chaque jour." This lofty disregard of routine is not, The above was written in April of last year; probably by this time through railway communication has been established. other matters they can exhibit, and even surpass, that pedantic adherence to forms and ceremonies so dear to the Continental railway official. Though thirty minutes late after a tedious journey of four hours, we were kept fully fifteen minutes just outside Bastia, in order that the lamps might be lighted throughout the train, solely to take us through a tunnel barely three hundred yards long into the terminus. I suppose they were solemnly extinguished again two minutes afterwards, as the train went no further that evening. But this has been a long digression, and meanwhile our carriage has been mounting steadily, though, so admirably engi neered is the road, almost imperceptibly, to the height of about fifteen hundred feet, at which elevation stands Bocognano, where we arrive about midday. It is a long, straggling village of over one thousand inhabitants, lying amongst groves of Spanish chestnuts, with houses here and there so close to each other on both sides, as to justify the road in calling itself a street. Bocognano, though but twenty-five miles from the capital, was only a year or two ago the stronghold of the Bellicosias, a numerous family of bandits, who for years had held their own against the gendarmes, acknowledging no laws but their own. Broken up at last, the Corsican authorities tell you that the leaders have left the island; people who think themselves better informed say they are still hiding in the macqui. "Last year," said our driver, "Bellicosia's mother was dying in Bocognano, and the gendarmes thought he would come to see her, and watched for him accordingly." "And did they catch him? we asked. No," replied the cocher, with a wink; "but perhaps he saw his mother for all that.' Soon after leaving Bocognano, we begin our mount to the top of the Vizzavona Pass, and wonder, as we leave the mouth of the tunnel far below us, whether the engineer has yet found out where he is wrong. Along the road towards the summit are tall posts some fifteen feet high, painted blue and red in alternate lengths. These are to enable the diligence drivers to estimate the depth of the snow in winter by counting the number of red and blue metres still visible. At the extreme summit (three thousand eight hundred feet) stands what is euphemistically styled a fort, a dreary place enough for the dozen or two soldiers quar- | young beech leaves, glancing like flecks of tered there. sunlight amongst the dark fir stems. For the first two or three miles of the But the tree of trees in Corsica is the descent we drove through a pine forest Spanish chestnut. Not only is it by far thick with trees, save where in places a the most ornamental, but it is also the clearance had been made by a forest fire, most useful. Men, horses, and pigs live showing acres of blackened stumps stand- on the fruit thereof, raw, or ground into ing out in dark relief against the snow-meal, cheap as dates to the Arab or rice to covered ground. the Indian. Thirteen miles from Bocognano we reached Vivario, our halting-place for the night, nestling at the foot of an amphitheatre of mountains, and so shut in by them that we wondered how we were to get out next morning. The church tower was undergoing repair, so the bell had been hung pro tem. in a large walnut-tree close by. But how shall I describe the scenery we had been passing through all day, in our thirty-eight miles from Ajaccio? Description of scenery is, I sometimes think, an art in itself, like landscape painting. Certainly it would require a far abler pen than mine to do justice to the natural beauties of Corsica. The steep mountain peaks of over five thousand feet high are clothed to the very top, not with the stunted timber usually found (in Europe, at least) at such altitudes, but with giants measuring often four to five feet in diameter, and in the case of the laricio pine and the beech, tall in proportion. Seen from a distance, the large, hardwood trees, such as oak, beech, and chestnut, give the high ridges a curiously indented appearance as of crumbled rock. Above all these, again, tower the white summits of Monte d'Oro, Rotondo, and others of less note, cold and clear against the morning sky, or pink under the setting sun. Many of the peaks are composed of a red granite which, contrary to one's idea of granite, is soft and friable. I suppose the fire was not hot enough, or the materials were badly mixed in the pre-historic period, when it was boiled and crushed into solidity. These granite rocks, worn by the ele ments into various quaint and jagged shapes, rise sheer many hundreds of feet, and varying in tone, as they do, from rose-color to dark red, form in places as at La Piana, on the west coast, one of the most striking and beautiful features in this most picturesque country. One meets with no such diversity of timber elsewhere. You emerge for a moment into sunshine, out of the deep gloom of a pine forest, only to be again plunged into a deeper shade of cork-trees and ilex, the blackness of which is in turn relieved by the light fresh green of the A single forest will sometimes extend over ten thousand acres, and the trees are well thinned, pruned, and renewed by gov. ernment forestiers. On the lands of private individuals, or on communal property, the chestnut on the high slopes takes the place of the olivetree lower down the valley. Many of the trees looked more than one hundred years old; their gnarled and twisted trunks, capable when hollow, as some of them were, of holding easily three or four men inside, reminded me more than any thing of Burnham Beeches. Every narrow valley was a grove of chestnuts, which followed the windings of the stream running down the centre through grass meadows as richly green as an English park, which the whole scene greatly resembled, cyclamens and narcissus taking the place of cowslips and primroses. This article would become a botanical treatise were I to enlarge upon the numberless evergreen, flowering, and aromatic shrubs, which, in addition to the wild olive, arbutus, and cotoneaster formed the macqui or natural brushwood on the open slopes of the mountains. In one place the prevailing tint would be given by the Mediterranean heath, in full flower, growing in some instances to a height of twelve feet or more, with quite a respectable trunk; the next slope would be white with cistus flowers, of which there were three prominent varieties, and these in turn would cede the first place, though they all intermingled, to the fragrant yel low cytisus of our green-houses. On a hot, sunny day after rain, the air is literally loaded with a dozen different aromatic odors, and we could quite understand Napoleon's remark, that if he were put down blindfold into Corsica, he should know where he was from the scent. After a comfortable night at Vivario, we started in pouring rain for our thirteenmile drive to Corté. Alas! it continued to pour with scarcely a break the whole way. The mist hung about everywhere, the clouds lay low on the mountain side, and we could just see sufficient to convince us that we were missing some very fine scenery. However, by the time we had finished our lunch at the Hotel Pieraggi, the sun was shining again, and the streets nearly dry. Corté is the third largest town in the island, and has remained far more exclusively Corsican in general character and appearance than the more modernized and go-ahead seaports of Ajaccio and Bastia. It stands most finely on a high rock, crowned with an ancient citadel, now so ruinous as to necessitate its being shortly pulled down as dangerous, thus depriving the place of its most picturesque feature. Two large mountain streams, the. Tavignano and Restonico, both well stocked with trout, meet at the base of the rock. At Corté we happened, as English people, to come in for more than the ordinary civility accorded to foreigners. It appeared that a gang of boys or young men had been accustomed to regard the travelling stranger as what a Chinaman calls a fanqui or "foreign devil," and would especially if the fanqui had not got a stick handy-throw stones at him, or at any defenceless lady sketching. Several outrages of the kind having occurred lately, a strong written remonstrance from the visitors followed up by a deputation to the mayor, resulted in the town crier being sent round the town blowing a trumpet, and escorted by gendarmes, with a proclamation threatening, in the name of the authorities, direst punishment to any offender. This happened the day before our arrival. Several of the older inhabitants stopped us purposely in the street to disclaim, on the part of the respectable population, any sympathy with the gang, and the proclamation had, at least, a transitory effect on some of the offenders themselves, for on meeting half a dozen of these interesting youths they, at a preconcerted signal, took off their hats, and, with a low bow, chorused ironically, "Goodmorning, sir," having, I should say, acquired painfully so much English purposely for the occasion. Treating their salute as genuine, I returned it with equal politeness, which perhaps disconcerted them as much as anything else I could have done. Corté is the starting point for the ascents of Monte d'Oro and Rotondo. We did not ourselves attempt any mountain climbing; I am therefore unable to give my readers any notion of the views to be enjoyed from the summits of these snowclad giants, though doubtless -as the guide-books say they "would well repay the toil of the ascent.' One of our polite friends there spontaneously offered us his donkey to ride, and his services as guide, if we would attempt the summit of Monte Rotondo, 9,068 feet "la montagne la plus haute presque du monde," as he proudly assured us. We declined his offer and considerately forbore to crush him under the twenty-nine thousand feet of Mt. Everest, or even bruise his patriotic pride with the height of Mt. Blanc. Though we saw several shooting-boxes amongst the forests on the top of the passes, I do not think, from what I could learn, that I should advise any one to go to Corsica purely for sport. Of course, first and foremost comes the moufflon; he is not legendary, but he is very scarce, and difficult to get at. Nor has he long, silky hair, as described in one of the guide-books, but he has a hide with close, short hair like a red deer, but lighter in color and finer in texture. A pair of massive horns curl over towards the middle of his back, and he has short legs like a goat. You may camp out for a week in summer, when the moufflon come down from the tops, and yet not get a shot, or even see one. It is said that the hunter, moreover, does not care to take you to, or put you in, the best place for a shot, but I fancy a system of payment by results, would, at all events, secure this for you., The moufflon is, I understand, more plentiful in Sardinia. In the way of smaller game, there are hares, duck, woodcock, and snipe; the latter are snared by the natives with horsehair nooses at least, so I was told by a sportsman who was plucking the tail of one of our horses as it stood at a wayside inn, for making filets for the very purpose. Wild boars are fairly plentiful; one was brought to our hotel at Ajaccio, bought for twenty francs, and duly eaten at table d'hôte. The flesh was dark, and the flavor uninteresting. For my part, I much prefer the fat, domestic pig. On Captain G's property, close to Ajaccio, in a cave some six hundred feet above his house, and which, more than once in the last eight or ten years has been, to the proprietors' knowledge, the shelter of bandits - - I saw the marks of two wild boar, which, just then, were every night ravaging Captain G's shrubberies for acorns and roots, the havoc being sadly apparent here and there. I conclude the hunter watches for them at night in an open space, for the scrub is so thick that it would be impossible to get a shot at them in the daytime except by driving, and pig-sticking would be out of the question. Perhaps the most lucrative sport in the island is the blackbird shooting. There are numbers of them on the hillsides, and they feed on the arbutus berries. The bodies are boned and made into pâtés de merle, and a very succulent pâté I was told it is. I was unable to taste it myself, as the vendors of Ajaccio were all sold out of last season's make. With the exception of goldfinches, siskins, and brown and green linnets, small birds were scarce. I saw a few hoopoes near the coast, and a couple of jays high up in a pine forest. ing strain, whether of setter, spaniel, or pointer, the latter perhaps predominating; for your Corsican is a keen sportsman, and to be a successful one he must have a chien de chasse. The strain crops out in the most unexpected and ridiculous ways; you will see the spike tail-as the Yankees call it-of a pointer adorning the stern of a dog in face and size like a pug or a terrier; or a creature, with something like the head of a setter, tending sheep. I asked of a peasant carrying a gun (most of them do) what sort of game he shot. "Oh, it is close time now," he replied, "shooting is défendu; besides," he added naively," at present I have no dog." One very handsome bird I had never On the whole, dogs have a good time in seen before, and though I saw a stuffed Corsica. Owners appear fond and proud one in Bastia, the shopman could not tell of their animals, and non-owners, as long me its name; indeed, he declared it was as the principle of love me, love my dog not a Corsican bird at all. It was about prevails, and the vendetta obtains, are also the size of a grey shrike, with a longish very careful of canine rights. A certain tail; on its neck and breast it was brilliant man who had been badly bitten in the leg, with the blue sheen of a kingfisher's back, was inconsiderate enough to shoot the while its own back was of the same red-dog; his wife paid the penalty with her dish cinnamon as the kingfisher's breast. life, within a fortnight. It had a thin beak, slightly curved, like a bee-eater's, and was evidently hawking gnats in the sunshine when I first saw it. There were about six of them in a flock, and now and then one would light on the telegraph wires along the road." Trout, from all I could hear, are fairly plentiful in many of the rivers, but of no great size. From the specimens I saw at table d'hôte, I should say that a half-pound fish would be above the average. There are, however, lakes amongst the mountains which may hold fish of a larger size. I did hear of at least two Englishmen who were staying at certain places purposely for fishing; but Englishmen on the subject of sport are so enthusiastic, that I cannot say that the fact itself is sufficient warranty for full baskets. No notice of Corsica, however short, should omit mention of the shells in which her coasts are so rich. In variety, and delicacy of shape and coloring, they are equal to the wonders of the tropical seas. A certain Miss Campbell, styled in Ajaccio, where she had a villa, the queen of Corsica, and who died about eighteen months ago, had for years devoted herself to the task of collecting, chiefly by means of dredging apparatus, every possible vari. ety. The result I was permitted to see by the present owner, and the collection truly would rejoice the heart of a conchologist, while so beautifully were they set out in their numerous cases round the room that one hardly knew whether to admire more the shells themselves, or the taste and industry shown in arranging One of the minor characteristics of Cor-them. sica is the Corsican dog. Not that there Having brought my readers to Corsica, is anything characteristic in the sense of perhaps I ought to see them well off the peculiarity of breed-far from it; the island again, and I strongly recommend peculiarity consists rather in each dog them to choose the short sea passage of exhibiting in its own proper person signs six hours from Bastia to Leghorn. The of every conceivable variety, but so beau-boats are small but the sea is generally tifully blended as to defy the acutest observer to say what breed any particular animal is meant for. Nature, indeed, seems to have been "so careless of the single type" that the only dog I saw with any pretensions to breeding was the bull dog belonging to the English consul, and that was a recent importation. There is, however, a perceptible sport smooth, being protected on most sides from the swell of the main Mediterranean. On a fine sunny day, the voyage is a pleasure and no penance, except to those determined few who insist upon being ill even before the ship has cast off from the quay. No prettier view, during our whole three weeks in Corsica, did we see than |