ep the
thought of death continually before him. They finally goad him on to
fling himself from a cliff into the sea, dragging with him the woman
he loves.

The 'Vergini della Rocca' (Maidens of the Crag), his last story, is more
an idyllic poem than a novel. Claudio Cantelmo, sickened with the
corruption of Rome, retires to his old home in the Abruzzi, where he
meets the three sisters Massimilla, Anatolia, Violante: "names
expressive as faces full of light and shade, and in which I seemed
already to discover an infinity of grace, of passion, and of sorrow." It
is inevitable that he should chose one of the three, but which? And in
the denouement the solution is only half implied.

D'Annunzio is now occupied with a new romance; and coming years will
doubtless present him all the more distinctively as a writer of Italy on
whom French inflences have been seed sowed in fertile ground. The place
in contemporary Italian of such work as his is indisputably
considerable.

THE DROWNED BOY

From 'The Triumph of Death'

All of a sudden, Albadora, the septuagenarian Cybele, she who had given
life to twenty-two sons and daughters, came toiling up the narrow lane
into the court, and indicating the neighboring shore, where it skirted
the promontory on the left, announced breathlessly:--

"Down yonder there has been a child drowned!"

Candia made the sign of the cross. Giorgio arose and ascended to the
loggia, to observe the spot designated. Upon the sand, below the
promontory, in close vicinity to the chain of rocks and the tunnel, he
perceived a blotch of white, presumably the sheet which hid the little
body. A group of people had gathered around it.

As Ippolita had gone to mass with Elena at the chapel of the Port, he
yielded to his curiosity and said to his entertainers:--

"I am going down to see."

"Why?" asked Candia. "Why do you wish to put a pain in your heart?"

Hastening down the narrow lane, he descended by a short cut to the
beach, and continued along the water. Reaching the spot, somewhat out of
breath, he inquired:--

"What has happened?"

The assembled peasants saluted him and made way for him. One of them
answered tranquilly:--

"The son of a mother has been drowned."

Another, clad in linen, who seemed to be standing guard over the corpse,
bent down and drew aside the sheet.

The inert little body was revealed, extended upon the unyielding sand.
It was a lad, eight or nine years old, fair and f