In the evening, a little before twilight, I love to go through the old fortress-gate, and sit down on some point of the high coast. Here I have around me no common picture,—Bonifazio on its beetling cliff hard by, at a giddy height above the sea; the beautiful strait, and the near Sardinia. There is an old book which reckons this rock of Bonifazio as the seventy-second wonder of the world. My good friend Lorenzo has read it. If I look down upon the sea-border from my little bench of stone, I have a complete view of the path of steps which leads down to the Marina. There I see people continually passing out and in through the gate; and from below they ride up the declivity mounted on their little asses, or drive them before them laden with melons, crossing and recrossing the path to make the ascent easier. I do not remember having seen such small donkeys as those of Bonifazio, and it was incomprehensible to me how a man could ride on so diminutive a creature. I saw no one with the fucile; fire-arms are here, comparatively speaking, unknown. When at any time I sat down on the bench by the little Chapel of San Rocco, I was soon surrounded by the curious, who would frequently take a place beside me with a kind of simple confidence, and ask me whence I came, what I came for, and whether or not my fatherland was civilized. This last question was very frequently addressed to me when I said that I came from Prussia. A very gentlemanly person sat down beside me one evening, and when we had fallen into a political conversation regarding the present king of Prussia, he suddenly expressed his surprise that Prussians should speak Italian. I have frequently, on other occasions, and in all earnest, been asked whether Italian was spoken in Prussia. My good friend then inquired whether I spoke Latin. When I replied that I understood it, he said that he also was acquainted with it, and immediately began: "_Multos annos jam ierunt, che io non habeo parlato il latinum._" When on the point of replying to him in the same language, I suddenly made the discovery that my Latin insisted on slipping into Italian, and that I was just about to express myself with greater elegance than even my Bonifazian friend. Two cognate languages are very apt to be mingled on the tongue if we are in the habit of daily expressing ourselves only in one of them. This gentleman accurately quoted Rousseau's prediction on Corsica, which it is impossible to escape hearing when in conversation with educated Corsicans.