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As with Aitone so with Valdoniello. The road shunned its depths and, leading me down through the magnificent fringe of it, brought me out upon an open slope, if that can be called open which is densely covered to the height of a man’s knees at times, and again to the height of his breast, with my old friend the macchia.

It was now twilight and I felt myself weary. Choosing an aromatic bed by the roadside where no prickly cactus thrust its way through the heather, I opened my wallet; pulled forth a sausage, a crust, and a skin of wine; supped; and stretched myself to sleep through the short summer night.

“The howly Mother presarve us! Whist now, Daniel Cullinan, did ye’ver hear the like of it?”

I am glad to remember now that, even as the voice fell on my ear and awoke me, I had presence enough of mind to roll quickly off my bed of heath away from the road and towards the shelter of a laurestinus bush a few paces from my elbow. But between me and the shrub lay a fern-masked hollow between two boulders, into which I fell with a shock, and so lay staring up at the heavens.

The wasted moon hung directly overhead in a sky already paling with dawn. And while I stared up at her, taking stock of my senses and wondering if here–here in Corsica–I had really heard that inappropriate sound, soon across the hillside on my left echoed an even stranger one–yet one I recognised at once as having mingled with my dreams; a woman’s voice pitched at first in a long monotonous wail and then undulating in semitones above and below the keynote–a voice which seemed to call from miles away–a sound as dismal as ever fell on a man’s ears.

“Arrah, let me go, Corp’ril! let me go, I tell yez! ‘Tis the banshee— who knows it better than I?–that heard the very spit of it the day my brother Mick was drowned in Waterford harbour, and me at Ballyroan that time in Queen’s County, and a long twenty-five miles away as ever the crow flies!”

“Ah, hold your whist, my son! Mebbee ’tis but some bird of the country– bad end to it!–or belike the man we’re after, that has spied us, and is putting a game on us.”

“Bird!” exclaimed the man he had called Daniel Cullinan, as again the wail rang down from the hills. “Catch the bird can talk like yondhar, and I give ye lave to eat him and me off the same dish. And if ’tis a man, and he’s anywhere but on the road, here’s a rare bottle of hay we’ll search through for him. Rest aisy now, Corp’ril, and give it up. That man with the mules, we’ll say, was a liar; and turn back before the worse befalls us!”

Through my ferny screen I saw them–two redcoats in British uniform disputing on the road not ten paces from my shelter. They moved on some fifty yards, still disputing, the first sunrays glinting on the barrels of the rifles they shouldered: and almost as soon as their backs were turned I broke cover and crept away into the macchia.

Now the macchia, as I soon discovered, is prettier to look at than to climb through. I was a fool not to content myself with keeping at a tolerably safe distance from the road. As it was, with fear at my heels and a plenty of inexperience to guide me, I crawled through thickets and blundered over sharply pointed rocks; found myself on the verge of falls from twenty to thirty feet in depth; twisted my ankles, pushed my head into cactus, tangled myself in creepers; found and followed goat-tracks which led into other goat-tracks and ended nowhere; tore my hands with briers and my shoes on jagged granite; tumbled into beds of fern, sweated, plucked at arresting thorns, and at the end of twenty minutes discovered what every Corsican knows from infancy–that to lose one’s way in the macchia is the simplest thing in life.