t appears that the Piedigriggios have taken it into their
heads to espouse the cause of our rival in the election, a
formidable alliance, which may cause two whole cantons to vote
against us, for the knaves have legs as long, in proportion, as the
range of their guns. Naturally we have the gendarmes with us, but
the brigands are much more powerful. As our host said to us this
morning: 'The gendarmes, they go, but the banditti, they stay.' In
the face of that very logical reasoning, we realized that there was
but one thing to do, to treat with the Piedigriggios, and make a
bargain with them. The mayor said a word to the old man, who
consulted his sons, and they are discussing the terms of the treaty
downstairs. I can hear the Governor's voice from here: 'Nonsense,
my dear fellow, I'm an old Corsican myself, you know.' And then the
other's tranquil reply, cut simultaneously with his tobacco by the
grating noise of the great scissors. The 'dear fellow' does not
seem to have faith; and I am inclined to think that matters will
not progress until the gold pieces ring on the table.

"The trouble is that Paganetti is well known in his native country.
The value of his word is written on the public square at Corte
which still awaits the monument to Paoli, in the vast crop of
humbuggery that he has succeeded in planting in this sterile
Ithacan island, and in the flabby, empty pocket-books of all the
wretched village cures, petty bourgeois, petty noblemen, whose
slender savings he has filched by dangling chimerical _combinazioni_
before their eyes. Upon my word, he needed all his phenomenal
assurance, together with the financial resources he now has at his
command to satisfy all demands, to venture to show his face here
again.

"After all, how much truth is there in these fabulous works
undertaken by the _Caisse Territoriale_?

"None at all.

"Mines which do not yield, which will never yield, as they exist
only on paper; quarries which as yet know not pickaxe or powder;
untilled, sandy moors, which they survey with a gesture, saying,
'We begin here, and we go way over yonder, to the devil.' It's the
same with the forests,--one whole densely wooded slope of
Monte-Rotondo, which belongs to us, it seems, but which it is not
practicable to cut unless aeronauts should do duty as woodcutt