Clouds hung about its hillsides, and the air was heavy and cold. The few people in its narrow street were ragged, miserable, lean. Their black eyes stared at the mule and its burden with apathy. Their stomachs were empty, their hearts were hard; they were half dead themselves; some famished sheep snatched at the grass growing between the stones; a woman plucked a living pigeon for the priest’s dinner; thirsty dogs lapped foul waters in the gutter, the sacristan came out of an arched door in a cloister: was he called for baptism or burial? The latter? Very well. He had put in three dead that morning. There was room for a fourth a-top of them. How long were the coffins left in the ditch? Oh, a year or so. Then the wood split; he mixed the bones together and put them in a heap. A man in Rome came up and bought these heaps at intervals; he believed they were ground, and used for making pastes, or paper, or bread; he was not sure; it was no business of his what they were turned to; he would call the Priore who was acting in the absence of his Reverence. Then he unlocked an iron gate, and showed a dreary enclosed square of rough brown turf, in which a few iron crosses, and hundreds of sticks nailed crosswise, were standing in many rows. A tethered kid was trying to browse, and hurting its tender mouth on the sere stalks. Across the ground ran two diagonal ditches always marked by freshly-piled lumps of earth; these were the resting-places of those who were poorest, where all were poor. The figure of a woman was standing there. It was that of the dead man’s granddaughter Muriella. Muriella Stravolta was a niece of Alcide and Lucio by an older brother, deceased, who had served in the army, and lived afterwards at Viterbo. She lived with the family and worked with them, rather because it never occurred to her that she could go elsewhere than from any welcome she got from them, or any attachment on either side. She was twenty-two years old, with one of those faces which have the old Latin beauty, and one of those fine forms so common in a country where the females walk barefoot and carry their water vases on their heads, and are erect and strong and supple as the young pines of the mountain side. She worked hard, she lived poorly, she seldom heard a kind word; but her uncles and their wives respected her; she had a strong arm and an eye which could plunge its rays into a sinful soul and read the secrets thereof. She always carried a long slim knife in her stays, and she knew how to use it.