witnesses, seemed to pass over the pallid corpse.

"Why," asked Giorgio, "do you not place him in the shade, in one of the
houses, on a bed?"

"He is not to be moved," declared the man on guard, "until they hold the
inquest."

"At least carry him into the shade, down there, below the embankment!"

Stubbornly the man reiterated, "He is not to be moved."

There could be no sadder sight than that frail, lifeless little being,
extended on the stones, and watched over by the impassive brute who
repeated his account every time in the selfsame words, and every time
made the selfsame gesture, throwing a pebble into the sea:--

"There; only to there."

A woman joined the group, a hook-nosed termagant, with gray eyes and
sour lips, mother of the dead boy's comrade. She manifested plainly a
mistrustful restlessness, as if she anticipated some accusation against
her own son. She spoke with bitterness, and seemed almost to bear a
grudge against the victim.

"It was his destiny. God had said to him, 'Go into the sea and end
yourself.'"

She gesticulated with vehemence. "What did he go in for, if he did not
know how to swim--?"

A young lad, a stranger in the district, the son of a mariner, repeated
contemptuously, "Yes, what did he go in for? We, yes, who know how to
swim--" ...

Other people joined the group, gazed with cold curiosity, then lingered
or passed on. A crowd occupied the railroad embankment, another gathered
on the crest of the promontory, as if at a spectacle. Children, seated
or kneeling, played with pebbles, tossing them into the air and catching
them, now on the back and now in the hollow of their hands. They all
showed the same profound indifference to the presence of other people's
troubles and of death.

Another woman joined the group on her way home from mass, wearing a
dress of silk and all her gold ornaments. For her also the harassed
custodian repeated his account, for her also he indicated the spot in
the water. She was talkative.

"I am always saying to _my_ children, 'Don't you go into the water, or I
will kill you!' The sea is the sea. Who can save himself?"

She called to mind other instances of drowning; she called to mind the
case of the drowned man with the head cut off, driven by the waves all
the way to San Vito, and found among the rocks by a child.

"Here, among these rocks. He came and told us, 'There is a dead man
there.' We thought he was joking. But we came and we found. H