The Waters of Edera

And she was so dexterous, so sure, so silent; even the sharp eyes of old Gianna never detected her nocturnal absence, even the shrewd observation of Clelia Alba never detected a...

Clelia Alba, to whom her own and her son's dignity was dear, said nothing of her own displeasure and surprise at Adone's absence. But she was only the more distressed by it. Nev...

Clelia Alba felt her heart soften despite herself for this lonely creature; though she was always suspicious of her, for she had never known any good thing come down from the hi...

It was a country of wide pastures, of moors covered with heath, of rock-born streams and rivulets, of forest and hill and dale, sparsely inhabited, with the sea to the eastward...

But she did not go over the bridge to Ruscino. She waited a little while then followed on his track. Gianna was right. She was a wild bird. She had been caught and tamed for a t...

He had walked over forty miles, and had eaten nothing except some bread and a piece of dried fish. But he always welcomed physical fatigue; it served to send to sleep the restle...

He was grateful for its gloom. He shrank from the light of the morning. Every drop of blood in his body, and in his brain, and in his limbs, seemed to him to turn to fire -- a f...

What was the marriage of the poor for the woman? What did it bring? What did it mean? The travail of child-bearing, the toil of the fields, the hardship of constant want, the in...

It was but a small space of it to one whose ancestors had reigned over the stream from its rise in the oak woods to its fall into the sea; but he thought that no one could dispu...

He was so intolerant of these poor people of Ruscino because he foresaw the hopelessness of forging their weak tempers into the metal necessary for resistance. As well might he...

The veterans of the village and the countryside remembered hearing their fathers say that the family of the Terra Vergine were descended from those great marquises who had reign...

Don Silverio's heart was with them, and by all the obligations of his calling was forced to be against them. He was of a militant temper; he would gladly have led them into acti...

Ruscino, placed midway in the valley, is only a village to which no traveller has for many years come, and of which no geographer ever speaks; it is marked on the maps of milita...

"My good woman -- my dear friend -- it is incredible! I see what you believe, but I cannot pardon you for believing it. Even were it what you choose to think -- which is not pos...

"Allow me to crave of your bounty a little more time, nevertheless. I am not habituated to business, but I believe, if I understand your worshipful self aright, the commune cont...

"Do you supposed, then, when a great public work is to be accomplished the promoters are to go hat in hand for permission to every peasant resident on the area?"

Then, as a young bull lowers his horns, he bent his head and bit through and through to the bone the wrist of the soldier who held him; in terror and pain the man shrieked and l...