beautifully
picturesque and foully offensive. Nothing less than a tropical
thunderstorm could have cleansed it. But none of its inhabitants minded.
They loafed about the deadly streams of filth and were quite unconscious
of anything disagreeable in the air. A Spanish village is purity itself
to such a place as Vico. But then the proud and haughty Corsicans object
to doing any work except upon their own fields. If an ordinance had been
passed to cleanse Vico's streets and that dreadful main drain, its
stream from the hills, it would have been necessary to import Italians
to do it. For all hard labour outside mere tillage is done by them. I
would willingly have employed a couple to clean up the little inn at
which we stayed for the night. It would have been a public service.

In the morning my friend and I started on a little walk to a village
higher in the hills called Renno. We went up a good open road, cut here
and there through _le maquis_, the scrub or bush of Corsica. And as we
went we got a good view of many little mountain villages, which hang for
the most part on the slope of the hills, being neither in the valley nor
on the summit. We were high enough to be among the chestnuts; vineyards
there were none. And at last we came to Renno, and found the villagers
taking a sad holiday. I spoke to them in bad Italian, and found that it
seemed good Corsican to them, perhaps even classical Corsican, if there
be such a thing, and learnt that there had been a funeral of a little
child that morning. They proposed to do no more work that day. Most of
the men were loafing along a wall by their little inn, and they were
soon reinforced by many women. In a few minutes the village had almost
forgotten the funeral in the excitement of seeing two strangers,
foreigners, Englishmen. They told us that so far as they remember no
foreigner, not even a Frenchman, had been there before. Their village
was indeed lost to the world; they looked on Vico, evil-smelling Vico,
as a great, fine town: Ajaccio was a distant and immense city. But no
one from Renno had been there. It was indeed possible that most of the
inhabitants had never seen the sea. There was something touching in this
quaint and simple isolation, and the men were simple too. I invited the
whole male population of the place to drink with me at the poor little
_cabaret_. The drink they took (it was the only drink save some sour
wine) was white brandy at ten centimes the glass. To