In the evening we strolled down the eastern suburb, and, crossing the bridge over the Tavignano, rambled on to the hill above, and the ruins of the Franciscan convent where Paoli assembled the legislative assembly, and in which the Anglo-Corsican parliament met while Corsica was united to England. The lithographic sketch of Corte was taken from beyond the bridge. Faithful as it is, one feels that neither pen nor pencil can do justice to such a scene. Art fails to lend the colouring of the tawny-orange vines, the pale-green olive-trees, the warm evening tints glowing on the purple hills, the mass of shade on the mountain sides first buried in twilight, the grey rocks, and, far away, aērial peaks vanishing in distance.
A pleasant thing is the evening stroll on the outskirts of town or village, where life offers so much novelty. How graceful the forms of those girls at the fountain, dipping their pitchers of antique form and a glossy green! Poising them on their heads with one arm raised, how lightly they trip back to the town, laughing and talking in the sweetest of tongues—sweet in their mouths even in its insular dialect!
A lazy Corsican is leading a goat, scarcely more bearded and shaggy than its owner. Others, still lazier, and wrapped in the rough _pelone_ hanging from their shoulders like an Irishman's frieze coat, bestride diminutive mules, while their wives trudge by the side, carrying burdens of firewood or vegetables on their heads and shoulders. Waggons, drawn by oxen and loaded with wine-casks, slowly creak along the road.
It is dusk as we lounge up the suburb, and the rude houses piled up round the base of the citadel look gloomier than ever. Light from a blazing pine-torch flashes from the door of a _cave_; it is a wine vault. The owner welcomes us to its dark recesses. Smeared with the juice of the ruddy grape, he is a very priest of Bacchus; but the processes carried on in his cave are only initiatory to the orgies. Here are vats filled with the new-pressed juice; there vats in the various stages of fermentation. Jolly, as becomes his profession, he gives us to taste the sweet must and drink the purer extract. He explains the process, and tells us that the vintage is a fair average, though the vine disease, the oïdion, has penetrated even into these mountains. _Evoe Bacche!_ The fumes of the reeking cave mount to our heads, the floor is slippery with the lees and trodden vine-leaves. We reel to the door, glad to breathe a fresher atmosphere.