e old man, who consulted his sons, and it is the conditions of this
treaty they are discussing downstairs. I hear the voice of our general
director, "Come, my dear fellow, you know I am an old Corsican myself,"
and then the other's quiet replies, broken, like his tobacco, by the
irritating noise of his scissors. The "dear fellow" does not seem to
have much confidence, and until the coin is ringing upon the table I
fancy there will not be any advance.

You see, Paganetti is known in his native country. The worth of his word
is written on the square in Corte, still waiting for the monument to
Paoli, on the vast fields of carrots which he has managed to plant
on the Island of Ithaca, in the gaping empty purses of all those
unfortunate small tradesmen, village priests, and petty nobility, whose
poor savings he has swallowed up dazzling their eyes with chimerical
_combinazioni_. Truly, for him to dare to come back here, it needed all
his phenomenal audacity, as well as the resources now at his disposal to
satisfy all claims.

And, indeed, what truth is there in the fabulous works undertaken by the
Territorial Bank?

None.

Mines, which produce nothing and never will produce anything, for they
exist only on paper; quarries, which are still innocent of pick or
dynamite, tracts of uncultivated sandy land that they survey with a
gesture, telling you, "We begin here, and we go right over there, as
far as you like." It is the same with the forests. The whole of a wooded
hill in Monte-Rotondo belongs to us, it seems, but the felling of the
trees is impossible unless aeronauts undertake the woodman's work. It is
the same with the watering-places, among which this miserable hamlet
of Pozzonegro is one of the most important, with its fountain whose
astonishing ferruginous properties Paganetti advertises. Of the
streamers, not a shadow. Stay--an old, half-ruined Genoese tower on the
shore of the Gulf of Ajaccio bears on a tarnished escutcheon, above
its hermetically sealed doors, this inscription: "Paganetti's Agency.
Maritime Company. Inquiry Office." Fat, gray lizards tend the office in
company with an owl. As for the railways, all these honest Corsicans to
whom I spoke of it smiled knowingly, replied with winks and mysterious
hints, and it was only this morning that I had the exceedingly
buffoonish explanation of all this reticence.

I had read among the documents which the director-general flaunts in our
eyes from time to tim