stayed the night at an inn, and in the morning joined the dense holiday
crowd that moved over the carpet of flowers on the pavement of the main
street. Suddenly there was a piercing cry--a pair of unmanageable horses
rushed through. I was thrown down, and all was blackness. When I awoke,
Mother of God, I lay with my head on Mariuccia's lap, beside the
lifeless form of my mother, crushed by the carriage wheel! The occupant
of the carriage, a gentleman of the Borghese family, had escaped with a
shaking, and sent a servant in rich livery with a purse containing
twenty scudi for the motherless child.

Mariuccia took me back to Rome; it was decided that her parents, who
kept flocks in the Campagna--honest people to whom my twenty scudi would
be wealth--should take charge of me. Thus, in the dreary Campagna, with
honest Benedetto and kindly Domenica, I spent the summer and the early
autumn in the ancient tomb which they had transformed into a hut. The
first week it rained incessantly; then, with the sun, came the
insufferable heat, increasing in intensity from day to day, from week to
week. Even the buffaloes lay like dead masses upon the burnt-up grass,
unless, excited to madness by the poison-stings of myriads of flies,
that covered them as if they were carrion, they rushed in mad career to
the Tiber to roll themselves in the yellow water.

One day, towards sunset, I was just opening the door to leave the hut,
when a man darted in so suddenly that I was thrown down. With lightning
speed he shut the door, and in a distressed tone uttered the name of the
Madonna, when a violent blow shattered the door, and the whole opening
was filled with the head of a fierce buffalo, whose body was tightly
squeezed into the doorway. The stranger seized a gun from the wall, took
aim, and shot the beast. The danger over, he lifted me from the ground,
and said: "Blessed be Madonna! You have saved my life." He inquired