bread, and at whiles with a bag of dried figs or a basket of cheeses and olives for supplement.  I learned that he purchased them in a paese to the southward, beyond the forest and beyond the ridge of the hills; but he made a mystery of this, and I had to be content with his word that in Corsica folk in the bush need never starve.  Also, sometimes I would hear his gun, and he would bring me home five or six brace of blackbirds strung on a wand of osier; and these birds grew plumper and made the better eating as autumn painted the arbutus with scarlet berries.

To me, so long held a prisoner within the hut, this change of season came with a shock upon the never-to-be-sufficiently-blessed day when Marc’antonio, having examined and felt my bones and pronounced them healed, lifted and bore me, as you might carry a child, up the path to the old camp on the ridge.  He was proud (good man) as he had a right to be.  Surgeons in Corsica there might be none, as he assured me, or none capable of probing an ordinary bullet wound.  But in youth he had learnt the art of bone-setting, and practised it upon the sheep which slipped and broke themselves in the gorge of the Taravo; and his care of me was a masterpiece, to be boasted over to his dying day.  “The smallest limp, at the outside!” he promised me; he would not answer entirely for the left leg, that thrice-teasing, thrice-accursed fracture.  Another ten days, and we might be sure; he could not allow me to set foot to ground under ten days.  But while he carried me he whistled a lively air, and broke off to promise me good shooting before a month was out—­shooting of blackbirds, of deer perhaps, perhaps even of a mufro.  Here the whistling grew largo espressivo.

And I?  I drew the upland air into my lungs, and the scent of the recovered macchia through my nostrils, and inhaled it as a man inhales tobacco-smoke, and could have whooped for joy.  Not by one-fifth was the scent so intense as I have since smelt it in spring, when all Corsica breaks into flower; yet intense enough and exhilarating after the dank odours of the valley.  But the colours!  On a sudden the macchia had burst into fruit—­carmine berries of the sarsaparilla, upon which a few late flowerets yet drooped, duller berries of the lentisk, olive-like berries of the phillyria, velvet purple berries of the myrtle, and (putting all to shade) yellow and scarlet fruit of the arbutus, clustering like fairy oranges, here and there so thickly that the whole thicket was afire and aflame, enough to have deceived Moses!  God, how good to see it and be alive!

Marc’antonio bore me up through the swimming air and laid me in the shadow of the cave—­her cave.  It was empty as she had left it, and my back pressed the very bed of fern on which she had lain.  The fern was dry now, after long winnowing by the wind that found its way into every crevice of this mountain summit.