Little Anania spent his days among these folk; from them he learned rude words and actions, and they accustomed him to the sight of drunkenness, and careless misery. In another smoke-blackened and cobwebby cellar beside Maestro Pane's workship, a poor, sick girl was withering. Years ago her father had gone away to work in an African mine, and he had never been heard of again. The girl, Rebecca, lived alone, diseased and abandoned, in her squalid den, swarming with flies and other insects. A little further on lived a widow, whose five children were supported by begging. Maestro Pane sometimes begged himself. But one and all they were merry. The five beggar children never stopped laughing. Maestro Pane talked to himself and related long pleasant tales of the jolly days when he was young. Only in the long luminous afternoons, when the streets were silent and the wasps buzzed over the elder flowers, inducing sleep to the little Anania stretched at the threshold, then in the hot stillness could be heard the sharp cry of Rebecca. It rose, it grew, it broke off; it recommenced, it hurled itself on high, it dashed itself to earth. It seemed, so to speak, to pierce the silence with a shower of sibilant arrows. In this cry was all the grief, all the evil, the poverty, the forlornness, the unseen wretchedness of the place and its dwellers; it was the voice even of things, the lament of the stones which dropped one by one from the blackened walls of the prehistoric houses, of the crumbling roof, of the broken stairs and worm-eaten balconies which menaced ruin; of the spurge which grew on the pathway, of the wild olive which shadowed the walls, of the children who had no food, of the women who had no clothes, of the men who drank to stupefy themselves, and beat their wives and their children and their beasts because they could not strike at their destiny; it was the voice of all sickness uncured, of all the misery ineluctably accepted like life itself. But who heeded? Little Anania, stretched across the threshold flapping away the flies and the wasps with a branch of elder, thought sleepily-- "Whew! Why is that girl screaming? What makes her scream? Why are there any sick people in the world?"