The road from Isola Rossa to Calvi keeps constantly by the coast. The ruins of many villages, destroyed by the Saracens, are visible on the hills. Above Monticello lie the ruins of a castle which belonged to the famous Giudice della Rocca, the lieutenant of the Pisans. This righteous judge of his people still lives in the memory of the Corsicans. He was just, they tell, even towards the brutes. One day he heard an unusual bleating among the lambs of a flock in the Balagna; he asked the shepherd what ailed them, and the man confessed that they were bleating for hunger, as the milk had been taken from their dams. Giudice thereupon ordered that the sheep should henceforth not be milked till the lambs were satisfied. The first town I passed was Algajola, a seaport of considerable antiquity, but with only two hundred inhabitants. Lying in ruins, as the bombs of the English left it sixty years ago, it bears mournful and striking testimony to the present state of Corsica. Even the inhabited houses resemble black ruins. A friendly old man, whom the wars of Napoleon had at one time taken as far as Berlin, showed me what was remarkable in Algajola, pointing out to me a great heap of stones as the _Palazzo della Communità_. In the time of the Genoese, Algajola was the central point of the Balagna; and as it was so situated that the inhabitants of every village in the province could travel to it and return home the same day, the Genoese fortified it, and raised it to a residency of one of their lieutenants of the island. But the most notable thing about the little town is its story of two faithful lovers, Chiarina and Tamante. The French had condemned Tamante to death; but his true-love armed herself, and with the aid of her friends rescued him from execution. The noble deeds that spring from faithful love are everywhere honoured by the people, and become immortal in their traditions; the story of Chiarina and Tamante is popular over the whole of Italy, and I have found it selling as a cheap pamphlet in the streets of Rome. On the shore near Algajola there is a quarry of singularly beautiful blue granite. I saw a pillar there which would do honour to an Indian or Egyptian temple. It is sixty feet in length, and twelve feet in diameter. It has been lying for years neglected on the field, exposed to the injuries of the weather, and noticed at most by the passing traveller, or the eagle that alights on it. Originally intended for a monument to Napoleon in Ajaccio, it was never removed from the quarry, as the necessary sum could not be raised for its transport. It will probably now be conveyed to Paris. The enormous block which supports the Vendôme pillar in Paris is also of this same exquisite granite of Algajola. With what just pride, therefore, may the Corsican stand before that pillar of Austerlitz, and tell the French: "My country produced both the great man up yonder, and the glorious granite on which he stands."