When the old man died who had been my father's comrade the troop fell to pieces, quarrelling over his leavings. The five brothers came to a common issue of stabbing. In Italy one takes to the knife as naturally as a child to the breast. Tired of their disputes, I left them squabbling and struck off by myself, and got a little band together, quite of youths, and with them made merry all across the country from sea to sea. We were at that time in the south. I was very popular with the people. When my games were done I could sing to the mandoline, and improvise, and make them laugh and weep: some graver men who heard me said I might have been a great actor or a great singer. Perhaps: I never was anything but Pipistrello the stroller. I wanted the fresh air and the wandering and the sports of my strength too much ever to have been shut in a roofed theatre, ever to have been cooped up where lamps were burning. One day, when we were in dusty, brown Calabria, parching just then under June suns, with heavy dust on its aloe-hedges and its maize-fields, a sudden remorse smote me: I thought of my mother, all alone in Orte. I had thought of her scores of times, but I had felt ashamed to go and see her--I who had left her so basely. This day my remorse was greater than my shame. I was master of my little troop. I said to them, "It is hot here: we will go up Rome-way, along the Tiber;" and we did so. I have never been out of my own land: I fancy it must be so dark there, the other side of the mountains. I know the by-roads and the hill-paths of Italy as a citizen knows the streets and lanes of his own _contrada_. We worked and played our way now up through the Basilicata and Campania and Latium, till at last we were right near Orte--dull, old, gray-colored Orte, crumbling away on the banks of Tiber. Then my heart beat and my knees shook, and I thought, If she is dead? I left my comrades drinking and resting at a wine-shop just outside the town, and went all alone to look for her. I found the house--the gloomy barred window hanging over the water, the dark stone walls frowning down on the gloomy street. There was a woman, quite old, with white hair, who was getting up water at the street-fountain that I had gone to a thousand times in my childhood. I looked at her. I did not know her: I only saw a woman feeble and old. But she, with the brass _secchia_ filled, turned round and saw me, and dropped the brazen pitcher on the ground, and fell at my feet with a bitter cry. Then I knew her.