Marc'antonio stared at me. "And why not, cavalier? You would not have us run after them and despatch them with the stiletto!" I endeavoured to explain to him the craft and mystery of fox-hunting as practised in England. He shook his head over it, greatly bewildered. "It seems a long ceremony for one little fox," was his criticism. "But if we did it with less ritual the foxes would disappear out of the country," I answered him. "And why not?" This naturally led me into a discourse on preserving game and on our English game laws, which, I regret to say, gravelled him utterly. "A peace of God for foxes and partridges! Why, what do you allow, then, for a _man?_" I explained that we did not shoot men in England. His jaw dropped. "Mbe! In the name of the Virgin, whatever do you do with them?" "We hang them sometimes, and sometimes we fight duels with them." I expounded in brief the distinction between these processes and their formalities, whereat he remained for a long while in a brown study. "Well," he admitted, "by all accounts you English have achieved liberty; but, _per Baccu_, you do strange things with it!" "Blackbirds, to begin with," he resumed, "and foxes, and a hare, maybe. Then in the next valley there are boars--small, and wild, and fierce, but our great half-tame ones have driven them off this mountain. After them we will extend ourselves and stalk for deer." He described the deer to me and its habits. It was, as I made out, an animal not unlike our red deer, but smaller, and of a duller coat; shy, too, and scarce. He gave me reasons for this. In summer the Corsican shepherds, each armed with a gun, pasture their sheep on the mountains, in winter along the plains and valleys; in either season driving off the poor stag, which in summer is left to range the parched lowlands and in winter the upper snows. Of late years, however, owing to the unsettled state of politics, the shepherds pastured not half the numbers of sheep that Marc'antonio remembered in his youth, and by consequence the deer had multiplied and grown bolder. He could promise me a stag. Nay, he even hoped that owing to these same causes the _mufri_ were pushing down by degrees to the seaboard from the inland mountains, which they mostly haunted. Ah, that was sport for kings! If fortune, one of these fine days, would send us a full-grown _mufrone_ now! But we began upon the blackbirds. I remember yet my first, and how, while I stood trembling a little with that excitement which only a sick man can know who takes up his gun again, Marc'antonio held up the bird and ripped open its crop, filled to bursting with myrtle berries; and the exquisite violet scent they exhaled.