It was on the Bridge of Golo, some miles from Bastia, that Massena was made corporal. Yes, Corsica is a wonderful island. Many a one has wandered among the lonely hills here, who never dreamed that he was yet to wear a crown. Pope Formosus made a beginning in the ninth century--he was a native of the Corsican village of Vivario; then a Corsican of Bastia followed him in the sixteenth century, Lazaro, the renegade, and Dey of Algiers; in the time of Napoleon, a Corsican woman was first Sultaness of Morocco; and Napoleon himself was first Emperor of Europe. CHAPTER III. ENVIRONS OF BASTIA. How beautiful the walks are here in the morning, or at moon-rise! A few steps and you are by the sea, or among the hills, and there or here, you are rid of the world, and deep in the refreshing solitude of nature. Dense olive-groves fringe some parts of the shore. I often lay among these, beside a little retired tomb, with a Moorish cupola, the burial-vault of some family, and looked out upon the sea, and the three islands on its farthest verge. It was a spot of delicious calm; the air was so sunny, so soothingly still, and wherever the eye rested, holiday repose and hermit loneliness, a waste of brown rocks on the strand, covered with prickly cactus, solitary watch-towers, not a human being, not a bird upon the water; and to the right and left, warm and sunny, the high blue hills. I mounted the heights immediately above Bastia. From these there is a very pleasant view of the town, the sea, and the islands. Vineyards, olive-gardens, orange-trees, little villas of forms the most bizarre; here and there a fan-palm, tombs among cypresses, ruins quite choked in ivy, are scattered on every side. The paths are difficult and toilsome; you wander over loose stones, over low walls, between bramble-hedges, among trailing ivy, and a wild and rank profusion of thistles. The view of the shore to the south of Bastia surprised me. The hills there, like almost all the Corsican hills, of a fine pyramidal form, retire farther from the shore, and slope gently down to a smiling plain. In this level lies the great pond of Biguglia, encircled with reeds, dead and still, hardly a fishing-skiff cutting its smooth waters. The sun was just sinking as I enjoyed this sight. The lake gleamed rosy red, the hills the same, and the sea was full of the evening splendour, with a single ship gliding across. The repose of a grand natural scene calms the soul. To the left I saw the cloister of San Antonio, among olive-trees and cypresses; two priests sat in the porch, and some black-veiled nuns were coming out of the church. I remembered a picture I had once seen of evening in Sicily, and found it here reproduced.