“But somewhere—­at some time—­I have smelt it before,” said I.  “The same scent, only fainter.  Why does it remind me of home?”

My father considered.  “I will tell you,” he said.  “In the corridor at home, outside my bedroom door, stands a wardrobe, and in it hang the clothes I wore, near upon twenty years ago, in Corsica.  They keep the fragrance of the macchia yet; and if, as a child, you ever opened that wardrobe, you recall it at this moment.”

“Yes,” said I, “that was the scent.”

My father leaned and gazed at the island with dim eyes.

Still no sign of house or habitation greeted us as we worked by short tacks towards a deep bay which my father, after a prolonged consultation of the chart, decided to be that of Sagona.  A sharp promontory ran out upon its northern side, and within the shelter of this Captain Pomery looked to find good anchorage.  But the Gauntlet, after all her battering, lay so poorly to the wind that darkness overtook us a good mile from land, and before we weathered the point and cast anchor in a little bight within, the moon had risen.  It showed us a steep shore near at hand, with many grey pinnacles of granite glimmering high over dark masses of forest trees, and in the farthest angle of the bight its rays travelled in silver down the waters of a miniature creek.

The hawser ran out into five fathoms of water.  We had lost our boat:  but Billy Priske had spent his afternoon in fashioning a raft out of four empty casks and a dozen broken lengths of deck-planking; and on this, leaving the seamen on board, the rest of us pushed off for shore.  For paddles we used a couple of spare oars.

The water, smooth as in a lake, gave us our choice to make a landing where we would.  My father, however, who had taken command, chose to steer straight for the entrance of the little creek.  There, between tall entrance rocks of granite, we passed through it into the shadow of folding woods where the moon was lost to us.  Sounding with our paddles, we found a good depth of water under the raft, lit a lantern, and pushed on, my father promising that we should discover a village or at least a hamlet at the creek-head.

“And you will find the inhabitants—­your subjects, Prosper—­ hospitable, too.  Whatever the island may have been in Seneca’s time, to deserve the abuse he heaped on it in exile, to-day the Corsicans keep more of the old classical virtues than any nation known to me.  In vendetta they will slay one another, using the worst treachery; but a stranger may walk the length of the island unarmed—­save against the Genoese—­and find a meal at the poorest cottage, and a bed, however rough, whereon he may sleep untroubled by suspicion.”

The raft grated and took ground on a shelving bank of sand, and Nat, who stood forward holding the lantern, made a motion to step on shore.  My father restrained him.

“Prosper goes first.”