should return to his paralysed body he should be unable to move.

It was the youngest of them, a little boy of seven years old, who had
thought to do that; the crutch had hit him so often.

The day had been only beginning when Don Silverio had reached the
cabin, but he resolved to await there the return of the family; its
hours were many and long and cruel in the midsummer heat, in this
foetid place, where more than a score of men, women, and children of
all ages, slept and swarmed through every season, and where the
floors of beaten earth were paven with filth three millimetres thick.
The people were absent, but their ordure, their urine, their lice,
their saliva were left there after them, and the stench of all was
concentrated on this bed where the old man wrestled with death.

Don Silverio stayed on in the sultry and pestilent steam which rose
up from the floor. Gnats and flies of all kinds buzzed in the heavy
air, or settled in black knots on the walls and the rafters. With a
bunch of dried maize-leaves he drove them off the old man's face and
hands and limbs, and ever and again at intervals gave the poor
creature a draught of water with a few drops in it from a phial of
cordial which he had brought with him. The hours passed, each seeming
longer than a day; at last the convulsive twitching of the jaws
ceased; the jaw had fallen, the dark cavern of the toothless mouth
yawned in a set grimace, the vitreous eyes were turned up into the
head: the old man was dead. But Don Silverio did not leave him; two
sows and a hog were in a stye which was open to the house; he knew
that they would come and gnaw the corpse if it were left to them;
they were almost starving, and grunted angrily.