rom the
Cornice. There are very few olive-trees, nor is the cultivated ground
backed up so immediately by stony mountains; but between the seashore
and the hills there is plenty of space for pasture-land, and orchards
of apricot and peach-trees, and orange gardens. This undulating
champaign, green with meadows and watered with clear streams, is very
refreshing to the eyes of Northern people, who may have wearied of the
bareness and greyness of Nice or Mentone. It is traversed by excellent
roads, recently constructed on a plan of the French Government, which
intersect the country in all directions, and offer an infinite variety
of rides or drives to visitors. The broken granite of which these
roads are made is very pleasant for riding over. Most of the hills
through which they strike, after starting from Ajaccio, are
clothed with a thick brushwood of box, ilex, lentisk, arbutus,
and laurustinus, which stretches down irregularly into vineyards,
olive-gardens, and meadows. It is, indeed, the native growth of the
island; for wherever a piece of ground is left untilled, the macchi
grow up, and the scent of their multitudinous aromatic blossoms is so
strong that it may be smelt miles out at sea. Napoleon, at S. Helena,
referred to this fragrance when he said that he should know Corsica
blindfold by the smell of its soil. Occasional woods of holm oak make
darker patches on the landscape, and a few pines fringe the side of
enclosure walls or towers. The prickly pear runs riot in and out
among the hedges and upon the walls, diversifying the colours of the
landscape with its strange grey-green masses and unwieldy fans. In
spring, when peach and almond trees are in blossom, and when the
roadside is starred with asphodels, this country is most beautiful in
its gladness. The macchi blaze with cistus flowers of red and silver.
Golden broom mixes with the dark purple of the great French lavender,
and over the whole mass of blossom wave plumes of Mediterranean heath
and sweet-scented yellow coronilla. Under the stems of the ilex peep
cyclamens, pink and sweet; the hedgerows are a tangle of vetches,
convolvuluses, lupines, orchises, and alliums, with here and there a
purple iris. It would be difficult to describe all the rare and lovely
plants which are found here in a profusion that surpasses even the
flower-gardens of the Cornice, and reminds one of the most favoured
Alpine valleys in their early spring.

Since the French occupied Co