Among the Greek-speaking inhabitants of Southern Italy a peculiar metre is set apart to the composition of the neniae, and the office of public wailer is transmitted from mother to daughter; so that the living praeficae are the lineal descendants of the praeficae who lived of old in the Grecian Motherland. Unrivalled in the matter of her improvisations as in the manner of their delivery, the hereditary dirge-singer no doubt, like a good actress, keenly realises at the moment the sorrow not her own, of which she undertakes the interpretation in return for a trifling gratuity, and to her hearers she appears as the genius or high priestess of woe: she excites them into a whirlwind of ecstatic paroxysms not greatly differing from kindred phenomena vouched for by the historians of religious mysticism. There are, however, one or two of the Graeco-Italic death-songs which bear too clear and touching a stamp of sincerity for us to attribute them even to the most skilled of hired "sobbing ones." There is no savour of vicarious mourning in the plaint of the desolate girl, who says to her dead mother that she will wait for her, so that she may tell her how she has passed the day: at eight she will await her, and if she does not come she will begin to weep; at nine she will await her, and if she comes not she will grow black as soot; at ten she will await her, and if she does not come at ten she will turn to earth, to earth that may be sown in. And it is difficult to believe that aught save the anguish of a mother's broken heart could have quickened the senses of an ignorant peasant to the tragic intensity of the following lament: Now they have buried thee, my little one, Who will make thy little bed? Black Death will make it for me For a very long night. Who will arrange thy pillows, So thou mayst sleep softly? Black Death will arrange them for me With hard stones. Who will awake thee, my daughter, When day is up? Down here it is always sleep, Always dark night. This my daughter was fair. When I went (with her) to high mass, The columns shone, The way grew bright.