"I was spinning at my distaff when I heard a loud noise; it was a gun-shot, it re-echoed in my heart. It seemed to say to me: 'Fly! thy brother dies.' I ran into the upper chamber. As I unlatched the door, 'I am struck to the heart,' he said; and I fell senseless to the ground. If I too died not, it was that one thought sustained me. Whom wouldst thou have to avenge thee? Our mother, nigh to death, or thy sister Maria? If Lario was not dead surely all this would not end without bloodshed. But of so great a race, thou dost only leave thy sister: she has no cousins, she is poor, an orphan, young. Still be at rest--to avenge thee, she suffices!" A dramatic vocero, dealing with the same subject, is that of the sister of Canino, a renowned brigand, who fell at Nazza in an encounter with the military. She begins by regretting that she has not a voice of thunder wherewith to rehearse his prowess. Alas! one early morning the soldiers ("barbarous set of bandits that they are!") sallied forth on his pursuit, and pounced upon him like wolves upon a lamb. When she heard the bustle of folks going to and fro in the street, she put her head out of window and asked what it was all about. "Thy brother has been slaughtered in the mountains," they reply. Even so it was; his arquebuse was of no use to him; no, nor his dagger, nor his pistol, nor yet his amulet. When they brought him in, and she beheld his wounds, the bitterness of her grief redoubled. Why did he not answer her--did he lack heart to do so? "Canino, heart of thy sister," she cries, "how thou art grown pale! Thou that wert so stalwart and so full of grace, thou who didst appear like unto a nosegay of flowers. Canino, heart of thy sister, they have taken thy life. I will plant a blackthorn in the land of Nazza, that none of our house may henceforth pass that way--for there were not three or four, but seven men against one. Would I could make my bed at the foot of the chestnut tree beneath whose shade they fired upon thy breast. I desire to cast aside these women's skirts, to arm me with poniard, and pistol, and gun, to gird me with the belt and pouch; Canino, heart of thy sister, I desire to avenge thy death." In the lamentations over one Matteo, a doctor who was murdered in 1745, we have an example of the songs improvised along the road to the grave. This time there are plenty of male relatives--brothers, brothers-in-law, and cousins--to accomplish the vendetta. The funeral procession passes through the village where the crime was committed, and one of the inhabitants, perhaps as a peace-offering, invites the whole party to come in and refresh themselves. To this a young girl replies: "We want none of your bread and wine; what we do want is your blood." She invokes a thunderbolt to exterminate every soul in the blood-guilty place. But an aged dame interposes, for a wonder, with milder counsels; she bids her savage sisters calm their wrath: "Is not Matteo in heaven with the