Many wild conjectures I made and patiently built upon, which, if I were to write them down here, would merely bemuse the reader or drive him to think me crazy.  There on my enchanted mountain summit, ringed about day after day by the silent land, removed from all human company but Marc’antonio’s, with no clock but the sun and no calendar but the creeping change of the season upon the macchia, what wonder if I forgot human probabilities at times in piecing and unpiecing solutions of a riddle which itself cried out against nature?

Marc’antonio was all the while as matter-of-fact as a good nurse ought to be.  He had fashioned me a capital pair of crutches out of boxwood, and no sooner could I creep about on them than he began to discourse, over the camp-fire, on the hunting excursions we were soon to make together.

“Pianu, pianu; we will grow strong, and get our hand in by little and little.  At first there will be the blackbirds and the foxes—­”

“You shoot foxes in Corsica?” I asked.

Marc’antonio stared at me.  “And why not, cavalier?  You would not have us run after them and despatch them with the stiletto!”

I endeavoured to explain to him the craft and mystery of fox-hunting as practised in England.  He shook his head over it, greatly bewildered.

“It seems a long ceremony for one little fox,” was his criticism.

“But if we did it with less ritual the foxes would disappear out of the country,” I answered him.

“And why not?”

This naturally led me into a discourse on preserving game and on our English game laws, which, I regret to say, gravelled him utterly.

“A peace of God for foxes and partridges!  Why, what do you allow, then, for a man?”

I explained that we did not shoot men in England.  His jaw dropped.

“Mbe!  In the name of the Virgin, whatever do you do with them?”

“We hang them sometimes, and sometimes we fight duels with them.”  I expounded in brief the distinction between these processes and their formalities, whereat he remained for a long while in a brown study.

“Well,” he admitted, “by all accounts you English have achieved liberty; but, per Baccu, you do strange things with it!”

“Blackbirds, to begin with,” he resumed, “and foxes, and a hare, maybe.  Then in the next valley there are boars—­small, and wild, and fierce, but our great half-tame ones have driven them off this mountain.  After them we will extend ourselves and stalk for deer.”

He described the deer to me and its habits.  It was, as I made out, an animal not unlike our red deer, but smaller, and of a duller coat; shy, too, and scarce.  He gave me reasons for this.  In summer the Corsican shepherds, each armed with a gun, pasture their sheep on the mountains, in winter along the plains and valleys; in either season driving off the poor stag, which in summer is left to range