ails, their bare feet, entangled in the
mess of line and baskets and cordage, stepped finally on something soft.
After a first instinctive cry of horrified revulsion, the men reached
down under water with their hands and drew out--a corpse.

_Tio_ Pascualo was hardly recognizable. His body was swollen, green, the
belly inflated to the point of bursting. The decaying flesh was gnawed
away in places by hungry little fishes, some of which, loath to let go
their prey, were still clinging to it by their teeth, wriggling their
tails and giving an appearance of disgusting life to the horrible mass.
The bold sailor's fate was clear. He had been hurled through the
hatchway by a lunge of the deck before the boat had been lost. Inside
there he had lain with his skull crushed. That boat--the dream of his
life, the achievement of thirty years of penny-saving--had proved to be
his coffin!

_Tio_ Pascualo's widow, in her hysterical weeping, shrank from the
repugnant body. The women of the Cabanal raised their voices in weird
lamentation and trooped in company behind the wooden box that was
carried at once to the cemetery. For a week _tio_ Pascualo was the
subject of every conversation. Then people forgot about him, save that
the appearance of his mourning widow, with one child in her arms and
another at her side, chanced to remind them of his grewsome end.

Tona, indeed, had lost not her husband only. Dire poverty was upon her,
not the poverty that is hard but tolerable, but the poverty that is
terrifying even to the poor, the want of the homeless and the
bread-less, the want that holds out a mendicant hand from the street
corner to beg a penny and give thanks for a crust of mildewed bread.

Help came readily while her misfortune was fresh in the minds of the
villagers. A subscription was taken up among the fisherfolk, and on the
proceeds, with other gifts that came in, she was able to get along for
three or four months. Then people forgot. Tona was no longer the widow
of a man lost at sea. She was a pauper ever on hand with the wail for
alms. Many doors were at last shut in her face, and old friends of her
girlhood, who had always welcomed her with a smile, now looked the other
way when she went by.

But Tona was not the woman to be crushed by general ostracism. _Eah!_
Enough of this bawling! We've got to get out of the dumps! She was a
woman with two arms like any other, and two brats that could eat and eat
and eat!

She had