braccio_, if any devil indeed there were beside man himself.

Should there be anywhere on the face of the earth, young women, good
women, mothers of babes who died of sheer hunger like this mother of
Nerina's up yonder in the snows of the Abruzzo? He thought not; his
heart revolted at the vision of her, a living skeleton on her heap of
leaves.

"Father brought all he had," continued the child, "but he could not
come back until after harvest, and when he came back she had been in
the ground two months and more. They put him in the same ditch when
his turn came; but she was no longer there, for they take up the
bones every three years and burn them. They say they must, else the
ditch would get too full."

Adone shuddered. He knew that tens of thousands died so, and had died
so ever since the days of Phenicians and Gauls and Goths. But it
revolted him. The few gorged, the many famished--strange
disproportion! unkind and unfair balance!

But what remedy was there?

Adone had read some socialistic and communistic literature; but it
had not satisfied him; it had seemed to him vain, verbose, alluring,
but unreal, no better adapted to cure any real hunger than the soaked
rag of Nerina's mother.