At the first light of dawn he covered her with dried ferns, that the children might not see how she lay there dead. “Run out,” he cried to them, “run out and play! Play as the white doe used to do!” And the children ran out and leapt this way and that across the stream, crying, “She was like this, and she did this, and this was the way she went!” So while they played along the banks of the stream, the hunter took up his beautiful dead wife and buried her. And to the children he said, “Your mother has gone away; when the white doe comes she will return also.” “She was like this,” they cried, laughing and playing, “and she did this, and this was the way she went!” And all the time as they played he seemed to see the white doe leaping before him in the sunlight. That night the hunter lay sleepless on his bed, wishing for the world to end; but in the crib by his side the two children lay in a sound slumber. Then he saw plainly in the moonlight the white doe, with a red mark in her side, standing still by the doorway. Soon she went to where the young ones were lying, and, as she touched the coverlet softly with her right fore-foot, all at once two young fawns rose up from the ground and sprang away into the open, following where the white doe beckoned them. Nor did they ever return. For the rest of his life the huntsman stayed where they left him, a sorrowful and lonely man. In the grave where lay the woman’s form he had slain he buried his bow and arrows far from the sight of the sun or the reach of his own hand; and coming to the place night by night, he would watch the mists and the moonrise, and cry, “White doe, white doe, will you not some day forgive me?” and did not know that she had forgiven him when, before she died, she kissed his two hands and made him sleep for the last time with his head on her knee. THE GENTLE COCKATRICE Far above the terraces of vine, where the goat pastures ended and the rocks began, the eye could take a clear view over the whole plain. From that point the world below spread itself out like a green map, and the only walls one could see were the white flanks and tower of the cathedral rising up from the grey roofs of the city; as for the streets, they seemed to be but narrow foot-tracks, on which people appeared like ants walking. This was the view of the town which Beppo, the son of the common hangman, loved best. It was little pleasure to him to be down there, where all the other lads drove him from their play: for the hang-man had had too much to do with the fathers and brothers of some of them, and his son was not popular. When there was a hanging they would rush off to the public square to see it; afterwards they made it their sport to play at hanging Beppo, if by chance they could catch him; and that play had a way at times of coming uncomfortably near to reality.