Falsehood is worse than hate: and that must be
If she whom I love should love me."

Many wild conjectures I made and patiently built upon, which, if I
were to write them down here, would merely bemuse the reader or drive
him to think me crazy. There on my enchanted mountain summit, ringed
about day after day by the silent land, removed from all human
company but Marc'antonio's, with no clock but the sun and no calendar
but the creeping change of the season upon the _macchia_, what wonder
if I forgot human probabilities at times in piecing and unpiecing
solutions of a riddle which itself cried out against nature?

Marc'antonio was all the while as matter-of-fact as a good nurse
ought to be. He had fashioned me a capital pair of crutches out of
boxwood, and no sooner could I creep about on them than he began to
discourse, over the camp-fire, on the hunting excursions we were soon
to make together.

"_Pianu, pianu_; we will grow strong, and get our hand in by little
and little. At first there will be the blackbirds and the foxes--"

"You shoot foxes in Corsica?" I asked.

Marc'antonio stared at me. "And why not, cavalier? You would not
have us run after them and despatch them with the stiletto!"

I endeavoured to explain to him the craft and mystery of fox-hunting
as practised in England. He shook his head over it, greatly
bewildered.

"It seems a long ceremony for one little fox," was his criticism.

"But if we did it with less ritual the foxes would disappear out of
the country," I answered him.

"And why not?"

This naturally led me into a discourse on preserving game and on our
English game laws, which, I regret to say, gravelled him utterly.

"A peace of God for foxes and partridges! Why, what do you allow,
then, for a _man?_"

I explained that we did not shoot men in England. His jaw dropped.

"Mbe! In the name of the Virgin, whatever do you do with them?"

"We hang them sometimes, and sometimes we fight duels with them."
I expounded in brief the distinction between these processes and
their formalities, whereat he remained for a long while in a brown
study.

"Well," he admitted, "by all accounts you English have achieved
liberty; but, _per Baccu_, you do strange things with it!"

"Blackbirds, to begin with," he resumed, "and foxes, and a hare,
maybe. Then in the next valley there are boars--small, and wild, and
fierce, but our great half-tame ones have driven them off this