d only by the tracks which
lead down their ravines. Here, three thousand feet and more above
the sea--upon which we looked down between cliff and woodland as
through a funnel, and upon the roofs and whitewashed walls of
fishing-villages on the edge of the blue--lived slow, sedate folks,
who called their dogs off us and stared upon us as portents and gave
us goat's-milk and bread, refusing the coins we proffered.
The inhabitants of this Cape (I have since learned) are a race apart
in Corsica; slow, peaceable, without politics and almost (as we
should say) without patriotism. We came to them as gods from the
heights, and they received and sped us as gods. They were too slow
of speech to question us, or even to express their astonishment.

There was one farm with a stream plunging past it, and, by the house
wall, a locked mill-wheel (God knows what it had ever ground), and by
the door below it a woman, seated on a flight of steps, with her
bosom half-covered and a sucking-child laid asleep in her lap.
She blinked in the sunshine as we came across the yard to her, and
said she--

"Salutation, O strangers, and pardon that I cannot rise: but the
little one is sick of a fever and I fear to stir him, for he makes as
if he would sleep. Nor is there any one else to entertain you, since
my husband has gone down to the _marina_ to fetch the wise woman who
lives there."

The Princess stepped close and stood over her. "_O paesana_," said
she, "do you and your man live here alone, so far up the mountain?"

"There is the _bambino_," said the mother, simply. "He is my first--
and a boy, by the gift of the Holy Virgin. Already he takes notice,
and soon he will be learning to talk: but since we both talk to him
and about him, you may say that already there are three of us, and
anon the good Lord may send us others. It is hard work, _O bella
donna_, on such a farm as ours, and doubly hard on my husband now for
these months that I have been able to help him but little. But with
a good man and his child--if God spare the child--I shall want no
happiness."

"Give me the child," said the Princess, taking a seat on the stone
slab beside her. "He shall not hurt with me while you fetch us a
draught of milk."

The woman stared at her and at me, fearfully at first, then with a
strange look in her eyes, between awe and disbelief and a growing
hope.

"Even when you came," she said hoarsely after a while, "I was praying
for an ang