of the coast.  There is a stateliness about the abrupt inclination of these granite slopes, rising from their frowning portals by sharp aretes to the snows piled on their summits, which contrasts in a strange way with the softness and beauty of the mingling sea and plain beneath.  In no landscape are more various qualities combined; in none are they so harmonised as to produce so strong a sense of majestic freedom and severe power.  Suppose that we are on the road to Corte, and have now reached Bocognano, the first considerable village since we left Ajaccio.  Bocognano might be chosen as typical of Corsican hill-villages, with its narrow street, and tall tower-like houses of five or six stories high, faced with rough granite, and pierced with the smallest windows and very narrow doorways.  These buildings have a mournful and desolate appearance.  There is none of the grandeur of antiquity about them; no sculptured arms or castellated turrets, or balconies or spacious staircases, such as are common in the poorest towns of Italy.  The signs of warlike occupation which they offer, and their sinister aspect of vigilance, are thoroughly prosaic.  They seem to suggest a state of society in which feud and violence were systematised into routine.  There is no relief to the savage austerity of their forbidding aspect; no signs of wealth or household comfort; no trace of art, no liveliness and gracefulness of architecture.  Perched upon their coigns of vantage, these villages seem always menacing, as if Saracen pirates, or Genoese marauders, or bandits bent on vengeance, were still for ever on the watch.  Forests of immensely old chestnut-trees surround Bocognano on every side, so that you step from the village streets into the shade of woods that seem to have remained untouched for centuries.  The country-people support themselves almost entirely upon the fruit of these chestnuts; and there is a large department of Corsica called Castagniccia, from the prevalence of these trees and the sustenance which the inhabitants derive from them.  Close by the village brawls a torrent, such as one may see in the Monte Rosa valleys or the Apennines, but very rarely in Switzerland.  It is of a pure green colour, absolutely like Indian jade, foaming round the granite boulders, and gliding over smooth slabs of polished stone, and eddying into still, deep pools fringed with fern.  Monte d’Oro, one of the largest mountains of Corsica, soars above, and from his snows the purest water, undefiled by glacier mud or the debris of avalanches, melts away.  Following the stream, we rise through the macchi and the chestnut woods, which grow more sparely by degrees, until we reach the zone of beeches.  Here the scene seems suddenly transferred to the Pyrenees; for the road is carried along abrupt slopes, thickly set with gigantic beech-trees, overgrown with pink and silver lichens.  In the early spring their last year’s leaves are still crisp with hoar-frost; one morning’s journey has brought us from the