rail, with slender
limbs. His head was supported on his few humble garments, rolled up in
place of pillow,--the shirt, the blue trousers, the red sash, the cap of
limp felt. His face was but slightly livid, with flat nose, prominent
forehead, and long, long lashes; the mouth was half open, with thick
lips which were turning blue, between which the widely spaced teeth
gleamed white. His neck was slender, flaccid as a wilted stem, and
seamed with tiny creases. The jointure of the arms at the shoulder
looked feeble. The arms themselves were fragile, and covered with a down
similar to the fine plumage which clothes the bodies of newly hatched
birds. The whole outline of the ribs was distinctly visible; down the
middle of the breast the skin was divided by a darker line; the navel
stood out, like a knot. The feet, slightly bloated, had assumed the same
sallow color as the little hands, which were callous and strewn with
warts, with white nails beginning to turn livid. On the left arm, on the
thighs near the groin, and further down, on the knees and along the
legs, appeared reddish blotches of scurf. Every detail of this wretched
little body assumed, in the eyes of Giorgio, an extraordinary
significance, immobile as it was and fixed forever in the rigidity
of death.

"How was he drowned? Where?" he questioned, lowering his voice.

The man dressed in linen gave, with some show of impatience, the account
which he had probably had to repeat too many times already. He had a
brutal countenance, square-cut, with bushy brows, and a large mouth,
harsh and savage. Only a little while after leading the sheep back to
their stalls, the lad, taking his breakfast along with him, had gone
down, together with a comrade, to bathe. He had hardly set foot in the
water, when he had fallen and was drowned. At the cries of his comrade,
some one from the house overhead on the bluff had hurried down, and
wading in up to the knees, had dragged him from the water half dead;
they had turned him upside down to make him throw up the water, they had
shaken him, but to no purpose. To indicate just how far the poor little
fellow had gone in, the man picked up a pebble and threw it into
the sea.

"There, only to there; at three yards from the shore!"

The sea lay at rest, breathing peacefully, close to the head of the dead
child. But the sun blazed fiercely down upon the sand; and something
pitiless, emanating from that sky of flame and from those stolid