Don Silverio went on his way over the moors homeward, for he had no means except his own limbs whereby to go his scattered parishioners.  When he reached the village and climbed its steep stones night had long fallen and he was sorely tired.  He entered by a door which was never locked, and found an oil wick burning on his table, which was set out with the brown crockery used for his frugal supper of cheese and lettuce and bread.  His old servant was abed.  His little dog alone was on the watch to welcome him.  It was a poor, plain place, with whitewashed walls and a few necessary articles of use; but it was clean and sweet, its brick floors were sanded, and the night air blew in from its open casement with the freshness from the river in it.  Its quiet was seldom disturbed except by the tolling of the bell for the church services; and it was welcome to him after the toil and heat and stench of the past day.

“My lot might have been worse,” he thought, as he broke his loaf; he was disinclined to eat; the filthy odours of the cabin pursued him.

He was used to have had a little weekly journal sent to him by the post; which came at rare intervals on an ass’s back to Ruscino, the ass and his rider, with a meal sack half filled by the meagre correspondence of the district, making the rounds of that part of the province with an irregularity which seemed as natural to the sufferers by it as to the postman himself.  “He cannot be everywhere at once,” they said of him with indulgence.

When he reached his home that evening the little news-sheet was lying on his table beside the brown crockery, the cheese, lettuces, and bread.  He scarcely touched the food; he was saddened and sickened by the day he had passed, although there had been nothing new in it, nothing of which he had not been witness a hundred times in the cabins of his parishioners.  The little paper caught his eye, he took it and opened it.  It was but a meagre thing, tardy of news, costing only two centimes, but it was the only publication which brought him any intelligence of that outer world from which he was as much separated as though he had been on a deserted isle in mid-ocean.

By the pale light of the single wick he turned over its thin sheet to distract his thoughts; there was war news in east and west, Church news in his own diocese and elsewhere; news all ten days old and more; political news also, scanty and timidly related.  The name of the stream running underneath the walls of Ruscino caught his regard; a few lines were headed with it, and these lines said curtly: 

“The project to divert the course of the Edera river will be brought before the Chamber shortly; the Minister of Agriculture is considered to favour the project.”

He held the sheet nearer to the light and read the paragraph again, and yet again.  The words were clear and indisputable in their meaning; they could not be misconstrued.  There was but one river Edera in the whole province, in the whole country; there could be no doubt as to what river was meant; yet it seemed to him utterly impossible that any such project could be conceived by any creature.  Divert the course of the Edera?  He felt stupefied.  He read the words over and over again; then he read them aloud in the stillness of the night, and his voice sounded strong in his own ears.