d blue eyes to this present time, and no one would
take them for Calabrians, nor for Sicilians, still less for
monkey-limbed, hang-dog mouthed, lying, lubberly Neapolitans who can
neither hand, reef nor steer, nor tell you the difference between a
bowline and a buntling, though you may show them a dozen times, nor
indeed can do anything but steal and blaspheme and be the foulest,
filthiest crew that Captain Satan ever shipped for the Long Voyage. Not
fit to slush down the mast of a collier, the best of them.

It must be a dozen years since Carmela died in that little house beyond
the cabbage garden. It was a glorious night in September--a strange
night in some ways, and not like other nights one remembers, for the
full moon had risen over the hills to the left, filling the world with a
transparent vapour of silver, so clear and so bright that the very light
seemed good to breathe as it is good to drink crystal water from a
spring. Verbicaro was all asleep behind Don Pietro Casale's house, and
in front, from the terrace before the guest-room, one could see the
great valley far below beyond the cabbages, deep and mysterious, with
silver-dashed shadows and sudden blacknesses, and bright points of white
where the moon's rays fell upon a solitary hut. And on the other side of
the valley, above Grisolia, a great round-topped mountain and on the top
of the mountain an enormous globe of cloud, full of lightning that
flashed unceasingly, so that the cloud was at one instant like a ball of
silver in the moonlight, and at the next like a ball of fire in
darkness. Not a breath stirred the air, and the strange thunderstorm
flashed out its life through the long hours, stationary and alone at its
vast height.

In the great silence two sounds broke the stillness from time to time;
the deep satisfied grunt of a pig turning his fattest side to the cobble
stones as he slept--and the long, low wail of a woman dying in great
pain.

The little room was very dark. A single wick burned in the boat-shaped
cup of the tall earthenware lamp, and there was little oil left in the
small receptacle. On the high trestle bed, upon the thinnest of straw
mattresses, decently covered with a coarse brown blanket, lay a pale
woman, emaciated to a degree hardly credible. A clean white handkerchief
was bound round her brow and covered her head, only a scanty lock or two
of fair hair escaping at the side of her face. The features were calm
and resigned, but