have ever been lawless, have ever loved war better than peace.

"But it is a false dawn," said the Abbe Susini of Olmeta, himself an
insatiable reader of newspapers, a keen and ardent politician. Like the
majority of Corsicans, he was a staunch Bonapartist, and held that the
founder of that marvellous dynasty was the greatest man to walk this
earth since the days of direct Divine inspiration.

It was only because Napoleon III was a Bonaparte that Corsica endured his
tyranny; perhaps, indeed, tyranny and an iron rule suited better than
equity or tolerance a people descended from the most ancient of the
fighting races, speaking a tongue wherein occur expressions of hate and
strife that are Tuscan, Sicilian, Greek, Spanish, and Arabic.

Now that the emperor's hand was losing its grip on the helm, there were
many in Corsica keenly alive to the fact that any disturbance in France
would probably lead to anarchy in the turbulent island. There were even
some who saw a hidden motive in the appointment of Colonel Gilbert as
engineer officer to a fortified place that had no need of his services.

Gilbert himself probably knew that his appointment had been made in
pursuance of the emperor's policy of road and rail. For Corsica was to be
opened up by a railway, and would have none of it. And though to-day the
railway from Bastia to Ajaccio is at last open, the station at Corte
remains a fortified place with a loopholed wall around it.

But Colonel Gilbert kept his own counsel. He sat, indeed, on the board of
the struggling railway--a gift of the French Government to a department
which has never paid its way, has always been an open wound. But he never
spoke there, and listened to the fierce speeches of the local members