It is in obedience to the precept of Horace that I have begun by plunging _in media res_.

Now that every one is asleep--the beautiful Colomba, the colonel, and his daughter--I will seize the opportunity to acquaint my reader with certain details of which he must not be ignorant, if he desires to follow the further course of this veracious history.

He is already aware that Colonel della Rebbia, Orso's father, had been assassinated.

Now, in Corsica, people are not murdered, as they are in France, by the first escaped convict who can devise no better means of relieving a man of his silver-plate.

In Corsica a man is murdered by his enemies--but the reason he has enemies is often very difficult to discover.