passage, where vessels rarely venture. The
wind, which blows uninterruptedly, has swept bare the forbidding coast;
it drives through the narrow straits and lays waste both sides. The pale
streaks of foam, clinging to the black rocks, whose countless peaks rise
up out of the water, look like bits of rag floating and drifting on the
surface of the sea.

The house of widow Saverini, clinging to the very edge of the precipice,
looks out, through its three windows, over this wild and desolate
picture.

She lived there alone, with her son Antonia and their dog "Semillante,"
a big, thin beast, with a long rough coat, of the sheep-dog breed. The
young man took her with him when out hunting.

One night, after some kind of a quarrel, Antoine Saverini was
treacherously stabbed by Nicolas Ravolati, who escaped the same evening
to Sardinia.

When the old mother received the body of her child, which the neighbors
had brought back to her, she did not cry, but she stayed there for a
long time motionless, watching him. Then, stretching her wrinkled hand
over the body, she promised him a vendetta. She did not wish anybody
near her, and she shut herself up beside the body with the dog, which
howled continuously, standing at the foot of the bed, her head stretched
towards her master and her tail between her legs. She did not move any
more than did the mother, who, now leaning over the body with a blank
stare, was weeping silently and watching it.

The young man, lying on his back, dressed in his jacket of coarse cloth,
torn at the chest, seemed to be asleep. But he had blood all over him;
on his shirt, which had been torn off in order to administer the first
aid; on his vest, on his trousers, on his face, on his hands. Clots of
blood had hardened in his beard and in his hair.

His old mother began to talk to him. At the sound of this voice the dog
quieted down.

"Never fear, my boy, my little baby, you shall be avenged. Sleep, sleep;
you shall be avenged. Do you hear? It's your mother's promise! And she
always keeps her word, your mother does, you know she does."

Slowly she leaned over him, pressing her cold lips to his dead ones.

Then Semillante began to howl again with a long, monotonous,
penetrating, horrible howl.

The two of them, the woman and the dog, remained there until morning.

Antoine Saverini was buried the next day and soon his name ceased to be
mentioned in Bonifacio.

He had neither brothers nor cousins. No