Their own beautiful language was his mother tongue. He was familiar with their manners and customs, and they felt flattered by his high appreciation of their literature and arts. Napoleon, in the midst of these stormy scenes, also dispatched an armament from Leghorn, to wrest his native island of Corsica from the dominion of the English. Scott, in allusion to the fact that Napoleon never manifested any special attachment for the obscure island of his birth, beautifully says, "He was like the young lion, who, while he is scattering the herds and destroying the hunters, thinks little of the forest cave in which he first saw the light." But at St. Helena Napoleon said, and few will read his remarks without emotion, "What recollections of childhood crowd upon my memory, when my thoughts are no longer occupied with political subjects, or with the insults of my jailer upon this rock. I am carried back to my first impressions of the life of man. It seems to me always in these moments of calm, that I should have been the happiest man in the world, with an income of twenty-five hundred dollars a year, living as the father of a family, with my wife and son, in our old house at Ajaccio. You, Montholon, remember its beautiful situation. You have often despoiled it of its finest bunches of grapes, when you ran off with Pauline to satisfy your childish appetite. Happy hours! The natal soil has infinite charms. Memory embellishes it with all its attractions, even to the very odor of the ground, which one can so realize to the senses, as to be able with the eyes shut, to tell the spot first trodden by the foot of childhood. I still remember with emotion the most minute details of a journey in which I accompanied Paoli. More than five hundred of us, young persons of the first families in the island, formed his guard of honor. I felt proud of walking by his side, and he appeared to take pleasure in pointing out to me, with paternal affection, the passes of our mountains which had been witnesses of the heroic struggle of our countrymen for independence. The impression made upon me still vibrates in my heart. Come, place your hand," said he to Montholon, "upon my bosom! See how it beats!" "And it was true," Montholon remarks, "his heart did beat with such rapidity as would have excited my astonishment, had I not been acquainted with his organization, and with the kind of electric commotion which his thoughts communicated to his whole being." "It is like the sound of a church bell," continued Napoleon. "There is none upon this rock. I am no longer accustomed to hear it. But the tones of a bell never fall upon my ear without awakening within me the emotions of childhood. The Angelus bell transported me back to pensive yet pleasant memories, when in the midst of earnest thoughts and burdened with the weight of an imperial crown, I heard its first sounds under the shady woods of St. Cloud. And often