There is only one point in regard to which Genoa and the "ever-faithful" Calvi are at feud. For the Calvese affirm that Columbus was a fellow-countryman of theirs. They say that his family, admittedly Genoese, had at an early period settled in Calvi. A very earnest contest was in fact for some time maintained about this question of birth, as formerly the seven cities disputed about the cradle of Homer. It is affirmed that Genoa suppressed the family register of the Colombos of Calvi, and changed the name of one of the streets of the town, the Colombo Street, into the street _Del Filo_. I find it also recorded that inhabitants of Calvi were the first Corsicans who sailed to America. I am informed further, that the name Colombo still exists in Calvi. Corsican authors even of the present day claim the great discoverer as their fellow-countryman; and Napoleon, during his residence in Elba, proposed instituting historical researches in regard to this point. We shall forbear attempting to settle it; Columbus in his will calls himself a native Genoese. The world might become envious if it were established that fate had bestowed upon the little Corsica the man who was greater even than Napoleon. Valiant men enough do honour to Calvi; and when we look at this little town within the fortress, and see that it is nothing but the heap of black and shattered ruins to which the bombs of the English reduced it, we read in its chronicle of desolation the history of departed heroes. Very strange is the aspect of a city, which, shattered by a bombardment almost a century ago, remains still at the present day in ruins. The clock of time seems here in Corsica to have stood still. An iron hand has maintained its grasp upon the past—upon the old popular customs—the dirges of the Etruscans, the family feuds of the Middle Ages, the barbarism of the Vendetta, the ancient, simple modes of life, and the ancient heroism; and as the people live in cities that have become gray in ruin, they live socially, in a state that, for the cultivated nations, is hoary tradition.