The discussion ended as we struck the level of the valley of the Golo, not far from Ponte Nuovo. The heat in this deep valley became suffocating, and the dusty high road was an ill exchange for the fresh mountain paths. Here, then, I made a decided halt, and this being the battle-field on which, in 1769, the French, after a desperate struggle, gained a decisive victory over General Paoli and the independent Corsicans, I had just engaged Antoine in pointing out the positions of the two armies, and tracing the tide of battle which, they say, deluged the Golo with blood and corpses for many miles,—when my lost companion came rushing down the hill-path among the rustling evergreens.
“You have been waiting long—excuse me; I have had a little adventure. That has detained me.”
“Humph!” My friend's sketching propensities often led him into a “little adventure,” ending in a story which, I should almost have imagined, he coined for a peace-offering, but that I had chapter and verse for the main incidents. There was that story of his being kicked off the mule, and—only the evening before—his _rencontre_ with the interesting young shepherd.
“The deuce you have, you are luckier than I am.”
“Now, my dear old fellow, we will push on to Ponte Nuovo, and you will soon get your's. I really am very sorry, but I could not help it.”
“But this is the famous battle-field, you know, and Antoine was just going to describe it.”
“That will keep. We will make our _reconnaissance_ after you have had your breakfast. As we go along, I will tell you how I got mine.”
The story shall be told as nearly as possible in my friend's own words.
“After you left me, I sat down to sketch in a little terraced garden, shaded by fig-trees and vines. My sketch was nearly finished, and I was thinking how I should overtake you, when a bright-eyed young maiden came up, and, with the childlike wonder of a race of people living far out of the track of sketching tourists, asked me ‘what I was doing.’
“‘Sit down, pretty maiden, and you shall see.’
“She obeyed with a _naïve_ simplicity, and we soon prattled away, she telling me that she had never gone beyond the neighbouring villages, and could not understand how I should come so far from _Inghilterra_, a country she had never heard of, to draw pictures of their wild mountains.