“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, and why not?” I demanded.  “If he can unite Corsica and win her freedom, does he not deserve to be her king?”

Marc’antonio shook his head.

“Would your Prince Camillo make a better one?” I urged.

“It is a question of right, cavalier.  I love this Paoli for trouncing the Genoese; but for denying the Prince his rights I must hate him, and especially for the grounds of his denial.”

“Tell me those grounds precisely, Marc’antonio.”

But he would not; and somehow I knew that they concerned the Princess.

“Paoli is generous in that he leaves us in peace,” he answered, evading the question; “and I must hate him all the more for this, because he spares us out of contempt.”

“Yet,” said I, musing, “that priest must have a card up his sleeve.  Rat that he looked, I cannot fancy him sticking to a ship until she foundered.”

Certainly we were left in peace.  For any sign that reached to us there, in our cup of he hills, the whole island might have been desolate.  The forest and the beasts in it, tame and wild, belonged—­so Marc’antonio informed me—­to the Colonne; the slopes between us and the sea to the lost great colony of Paomia.  No one disturbed us.  Week followed week, yet since the Prince had passed with his men no traveller came down the path which ran between our hut and Nat’s grave, over which the undergrowth already was pushing its autumn shoots.  Indeed, the path led no whither but to the sea and the forsaken village.  Twice a week Marc’antonio would leave me for five or six hours and return with