two months before her time. Her companions had had no time or thought
to do more than to stretch her on the wet sand, with some hempen
sheets, which had not yet been thrown in the water, between her and
the ground; and the cries of her in her travail had echoed over the
stream and had startled the kingfishers in the osiers, and the wild
ducks in the marshes, and the tawny owls asleep in the belfry tower
of the village. But her pains had been brief though sharp, and her
son had first seen the light beside the water; a strong and healthy
child, none the worse for his too early advent, and the rough
river-women had dipped him in the shallows, where their linen and
their wooden beaters were, and had wrapped him up in a soiled woollen
shirt, and had laid him down with his face on his mother's young
breast, opening his shut unconscious mouth with their rough fingers,
and crying in his deaf ear, "Suck! and grow to be a man!"

Clelia Alba was now a woman of forty-one years old, and he, her only
son, was twenty-four; they had named him Adone; the beautiful Greek
Adonais having passed into the number of the saints of the Latin
Church, by a transition so frequent in hagiology that its strangeness
is not remembered save by a scholar here and there. When he had been
born she had been a young creature of seventeen, with the wild grace
of a forest doe; with that nobility of beauty, that purity of
outline, and that harmony of structure, which still exist in those
Italians in whom the pure Italiote blood is undefiled by Jew or
Gentile. Now her abundant hair was white, and her features were
bronzed and lined by open-air work, and her hands of beautiful shape
were hard as horn through working in the fields. She looked an old
woman, and was thought so by others, and thought herself so: for
youth is soon over in these parts, and there is no half-way house
between youth and age for the peasant.