artichokes and a basket of small fish. A couple of chairs stood on the uncarpeted plank floor, and the only other articles in the room were the lamps, some vases of paper flowers, and the inevitable family photographs upon the mantel-piece.... In this unlovely home live an old woman, her daughter and granddaughter, with the occasional additional presence of the grandson, a young fisherman, who occupied the kitchen during his brief home-comings, his mother and sister then sharing a bed in the next room.”[A] [A] “Through Corsica with a Camera.”--D’Este. Most of these high houses surround a central court. The system of drainage is bad. All the refuse is got rid of by the simple plan of pouring it into a number of earthenware pipes which are so arranged that the open ends of the pipes are under the several windows of the house. When the occupants are in a hurry, they throw all the rubbish into the courtyard below, and leave it there to rot. The odours are indescribable, and one wonders how the people find it possible to live amongst them. The chief things noticeable in all places, large or small, where the Corsican lives are always dirt and smells. The shutters of the houses are broken, the paint on the woodwork is blistered, the plaster is peeling off the walls, and ugly stains disfigure the ancient whitewash. The family washing is hung on lines between the different houses, and there is usually so much of it that the visitor is left bewildered as to why a people who are so uncleanly as regards their bodies and their houses should take the trouble to wash their clothes. In Bastia there are two towns, an old and a new. The new is certainly at the present time a little cleaner than the old, but given sufficient time, it will surely become equally unpleasant to the nose. In the new town stands a statue of Napoleon, looking dreamily away across the harbour to that little island of Elba, where he spent a period of short exile from France. As someone has remarked, the stone figure seems to be saying, “How could you expect that little island to hold me?” [Illustration: OLD HOUSES, BASTIA.] It is to the new town that the ships come that carry the produce of the island to other lands. The quays are always busy and crowded, and people have to pick their way amongst piles of cork, stacks of wine-bottles, casks of olive-oil, and loads of charcoal. CHAPTER VII AJACCIO AND NAPOLEON Ajaccio as we see it to-day is not an old town. The fortress that is known to have existed here in earlier times has disappeared, and the city that was the seat of a bishopric for hundreds of years has vanished, without leaving a trace of its former existence behind. The modern Ajaccio, or rather, the older part of the modern Ajaccio, was established in the fifteenth century by the Genoese on a site about a mile to the south of the old hill-city which tradition asserts to have once flourished there.