1 64. THE WALKS ABROAD OF 



person) into whose hands this letter might have come, 

 would undoubtedly have drawn certain inferences 

 from it, such as 



1. That the writer of this letter was a gamekeeper. 

 Not a difficult inference this, seeing that he announced 

 it himself. 



2. That the keeper was a Corsican. At least his 

 name, which was very Italian, pointed to this. 



3. That this Corsican gamekeeper was a retired 

 gendarme. This might be gathered from the style of 

 his letter, which while striving to be as polite as 

 possible, still retained an official smack, and some- 

 thing of the formal and precise manner of a legal 

 document. 



4. That the aforesaid Corsican, keeper, ex-gendarme, 

 employed his spare time in the formation of a collec- 

 tion of the animals of the locality, and that he had 

 not, from lack of the requisite knowledge, been able 

 to arrange it himself. 



5. Lastly, if he were acquainted with the good 

 reputation of Uncle Bob, that this Corsican, ex-gen- 

 darme, presently gamekeeper and natural history col- 

 lector, had been the recipient of kind offices from the 

 learned doctor. 



A logician who should have made all these infer- 

 ences would not have been in error. 



Pietro Franceschini, after having patrolled on horse- 

 back various parts of France under the insignia of the 



