1848.

In the year 1785, there died at Montpel-, lier, in the prime of life, a Corsican lawyer, who, in his early youth, had fought by the side of Paoli in the war of Corsican independence, but had afterwards submitted to the fortune that had attached him, together with about 150,000 persons, his fellow-islanders, all of Italian origin, as subjects to the crown of France. His place of residence was the town of Ajaccio, in his native island, where he held the post of assessor to the judicial court; but business obliged him occasionally to visit France, and it was during one of those visits that he died. He left a widow, still a young and beautiful woman, and eight children, of whom the eldest was but seventeen years, and the youngest only three months old. Left in somewhat straitened circumstances, the chief reliance of the family was in a rich old uncle, an ecclesiastic in

the Corsican Church. Two of the children, indeed, had already, in a manner, been provided for. The eldest, a son, had begun the study of the law. The second, a youth of sixteen, had completed his education at the military academies of Brienne and Paris, and had just received, or was on the point of receiving, a sub-lieutenancy of artillery in the French king's army. It was on this young soldier, rather than on his elder brother, that the hopes of the family were fixed. Even the poor father's ravings on his death-bed, it is said, were all about his absent boy, Napoleon, and a "great sword" that he was to bequeath to him.

Sixty-four years have elapsed since thentwo generations and part of a third-and what changes have they not seen in the fortunes of the Corsican family! In the first, issuing from their native island, like some