ied in from the
adjoining room; and in less than ten minutes the Lombard peasant, who
was passing round the hat, had collected forty-two lire.

"Do you see," he then said, turning to the boy, "how fast things are
done in America?"

"Drink!" cried another to him, offering him a glass of wine; "to the
health of your mother!"

All raised their glasses, and Marco repeated, "To the health of my--"
But a sob of joy choked him, and, setting the glass on the table, he
flung himself on the old man's neck.

At daybreak on the following morning he set out for Cordova, ardent and
smiling, filled with presentiments of happiness. But there is no
cheerfulness that rules for long in the face of certain sinister aspects
of nature. The weather was close and dull; the train, which was nearly
empty, ran through an immense plain, destitute of every sign of
habitation. He found himself alone in a very long car, which resembled
those on trains for the wounded. He gazed to the right, he gazed to the
left, and he saw nothing but an endless solitude, strewn with tiny,
deformed trees, with contorted trunks and branches, in attitudes such as
were never seen before, almost of wrath and anguish, and a sparse and
melancholy vegetation, which gave to the plain the aspect of a ruined
cemetery.

He dozed for half an hour; then resumed his survey: the spectacle was
still the same. The railway stations were deserted, like the dwellings
of hermits; and when the train stopped, not a sound was heard; it seemed
to him that he was alone in a lost train, abandoned in the middle of a
desert. It seemed to him as though each station must be the last, and
that he should then enter the mysterious regions of the savages. An icy
breeze nipped his face. On embarking at Genoa, towards the end of April,
it had not occurred to him that he should find winter in America, and
he was dressed for summer.

After several hours of this he began to suffer from cold, and in
connection with the cold, from the fatigue of the days he had recently
passed through, filled as they had been with violent emotions, and from
sleepless and harassing nights. He fell asleep, slept a long time, and
awoke benumbed; he felt ill. Then a vague terror of falling ill, of
dying on the journey, seized upon him; a fear of being thrown out there,
in the middle of that desolate prairie, where his body would be torn in
pieces by dogs and birds of prey, like the corpses of horses and cows
which he had