[Illustration] _LE SELVE_ _UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME._ =A Gender in Satin.= By RITA. =The Making of Mary.= By JEAN FORSYTH. =Diana’s Hunting.= By R. BUCHANAN. =Sir Quixote of the Moors.= By JOHN BUCHAN. =Dreams.= By OLIVE SCHREINER. _6th Edition._ =The Honour of the Flag and other Stories.= By W. CLARK RUSSELL. Le Selve BY OUIDA LONDON T. FISHER UNWIN 1896 COPYRIGHT BY T. FISHER UNWIN, 1896 (_for Great Britain_). COPYRIGHT BY BACHELLER, JOHNSON & BACHELLER (_for the United States of America_). _Le Selve._ I. It was a cold black night, with neither moon or stars, and an old peasant lay dying. He was all alone. No one thought it worth while to waste time beside him. He was eighty-three years old, and, according to his sons, ought to have been dead long before this autumn. They and their families sat round a fire of logs and chips, and talked amongst themselves; not of him, he was no more of any account. On the morrow, or at farthest the day after, he would be carried to the ditch in the burial-ground at the nearest village and tumbled into it; and so--_Addio per sempre_. It would be trouble enough to take him there; the graveyard was fifteen miles and more away. The big room, which was kitchen, eating-place, and cellar in one, was reeking with filth; cobwebs years old hung black and gray from the rafters; the floor of beaten earth was deep with the dust and mud brought by scores of dirty feet; the smoke from the yawning chimney hung in dark mist about the walls. Upstairs there was no fire. Why waste good fuel in warming cold limbs, cold from age and death? “I am cold, I am cold!” muttered the old man; but no one heeded. Of course he was cold; people who were dying always were so. He shivered and shook under his cotton coverlet; and it was dark, so dark, they had left him no light; light burns oil, and what could he see or hope to see? His eyes were already glazing. “Lazzaro got a whole crown for those turkeys which died of the pip,” said his elder son in the kitchen below, stretching his hands towards the blaze. Lazzaro was a neighbour who dwelt on a clearing, and made cask-hoops and wooden shoes. “Some folks have luck,” said his son’s wife as she gave her left breast to her youngest child who stood at her knee. Then they were silent, and the man cracked a nut with his teeth. The wood crackled, the child sucked, some big boys gambled with plum-stones for counters on the dirty bricks, a girl of twelve years old caught a cricket amongst the ashes, and pulled it in a leisurely way to pieces; two smaller children, twins, watching enviously and with deep interest. “The northern birds went overhead at noon,” said the younger brother Lucio after a time. “Damn them! they fly too high to be shot,” said the elder, Alcide. “They were all in a black three-sided mass,” said the younger. “They always fly like that,” said the elder. “They’re a shrewd lot, those big birds.”