heather bells red as
blood, or were snowed white with myrtle blossom: wild roses trailed
everywhere, and blue vetches: on the rock ledges the cistus kept its late
flowers, white, yellow, or crimson: while from shrub to shrub away to the
rock pinnacles high over my left shoulder honeysuckles and clematis looped
themselves in festoons as thick as a man's waist, or flung themselves over
the chasm on my right, smothering the ilex saplings which clung to its
sides, and hiding the water which roared three hundred feet below.
I think that my month in prison must have sharpened my appetite for wild
and natural beauty, for I skipped as I went, and whistled in sheer
lightness of heart. "O Corsicans!" I exclaimed, "O favoured race of
mortals, who spend your pastoral days in scenes so romantic, far from the
noise of cities, the restless ambition of courts!"

At the first village of Otta, where the pass narrows to a really
stupendous gorge and winds its way up between pyramidal crags soaring out
of a sea of green chestnut groves, one of this favoured race (by name
Giuse) attempted to sell me a mule at something like twice its value.
I hired the beast instead, and also the services of its master to guide me
through the two great forests which lay between me and the plain of the
Niolo, one on either side of the ridge ahead. He carried a gun, and wore
an air of extreme ferocity which daunted me until I perceived that all the
rest of the village-men were similarly favoured. Of his politeness after
striking the bargain I had no cause to complain. He accepted--and
apparently with the simplest credulity--my account of myself, that I was
an Englishman bound in the service of the Government to inspect and report
on the forests of the interior, on the timber of which King George was
prepared to lend money in support of the patriot troops. He himself had
served as a stripling in Paoli's militia across the mountains on the great
and terrible day of Ponte Nuovo, and by fits and starts, whenever the road
allowed our two mules to travel abreast in safety, he told me the story of
it, in a dialect of which I understood but one word in three, so different
were its harsh aspirates and gutturals from any sounds in the Italian
familiar to me.

The mules stepped out well, and in the shade of the ravine we pushed on
steadily through the heat of the day. We had left the _macchia_ far
below us, and the road wound between and around sheer scarps of gr