noese, having stolen his infant son, exposed the
child in the breach to stop the firing; and how Gaffori called to
them "I was a Corsican before I was a father," and the cannonade went
on, yet the child miraculously escaped unhurt. I heard of Sampiero's
last fight with his murderers, in the torrent bed under the castle of
Giglio; of Maria Gentili of Oletta, who died to save her brother from
death. . . . And until now these had not even been names to me!
I had adventured to win this kingdom as a man goes out with a gun to
shoot partridges. I could not hide my shame of it.

"You have taught me much in these evenings, O Marc'antonio," said I.

"And you, cavalier, have taught me much."

"In what way, my friend?"

Marc'antonio looked across the fire with a smile, and held up a
carved piece of wood he had been sharpening to a point. In shape it
resembled an elephant's tusk, and it formed part of an apparatus to
keep a pig from straying, two of these tusks being so fastened above
the beast's neck that they caught and hampered him in the
undergrowth.

"Eccu!" said Marc'antonio. "You have taught me to be a swinekeeper,
for instance. There is no shame in any calling but what a man brings
to it. You have taught me to endure lesser things for the sake of
greater, and that is a hard lesson at my age."

From Marc'antonio I learned not only that this Corsica was a land
with its own ambitions, which no stranger might share--a nation small
but earnest, in which my presence was merely impertinent and
laughable withal--but that the Prince Camillo's chances of becoming
its king were only a trifle less derisory than my own. Marc'antonio
would not admit this in so many words; but he gave me to understand
that Pasquale Paoli had by this time cleared the interior of the
Genoese, and was thrusting them little by little from their last grip
on the extremities of the island--Calvi and some smaller strongholds
in the north, Bonifacio in the south, and a few isolated forts along
the littoral; that the people looked up to him and to him only; that
the constitution he had invented was working and working well; that
his writ ran throughout Corsica, and his laws were enforced, even
those which he had aimed at vendetta and cross-vendetta; and that the
militia was faithful to him, almost to a man. "Nor will I deny,
cavalier," he added, "that he seems to me an honest patriot and a
wise one. They say he seeks the Crown, however."

"Well,