pasto or conforto, food supplied for mourners, stands upon a side table, and round the room are men with savage eyes and bristling beards, armed to the teeth, keen for vengeance.  The dead man’s musket and pocket-pistol lie beside him, and his bloody shirt is hung up at his head.  Suddenly, the silence, hitherto only disturbed by suppressed groans and muttered curses, is broken by a sharp cry.  A woman rises:  it is the sister of the dead man; she seizes his shirt, and holding it aloft with Maenad gestures and frantic screams, gives rhythmic utterance to her grief and rage.  ’I was spinning, when I heard a great noise:  it was a gunshot, which went into my heart, and seemed a voice that cried, “Run, thy brother is dying.”  I ran into the room above; I took the blow into my breast; I said, “Now he is dead, there is nothing to give me comfort.  Who will undertake thy vengeance?  When I show thy shirt, who will vow to let his beard grow till the murderer is slain?  Who is there left to do it?  A mother near her death?  A sister?  Of all our race there is only left a woman, without kin, poor, orphan, and a girl.  Yet, O my brother! never fear.  For thy vengeance thy sister is enough!

  ’"Ma per fa la to bindetta,
  Sta siguru, basta anch ella!

Give me the pistol; I will shoulder the gun; I will away to the hills.  My brother, heart of thy sister, thou shalt be avenged!"’ A vocero declaimed upon the bier of Giammatteo and Pasquale, two cousins, by the sister of the former, is still fiercer and more energetic in its malediction.  This Erinnys of revenge prays Christ and all the saints to extirpate the murderer’s whole race, to shrivel it up till it passes from the earth.  Then, with a sudden and vehement transition to the pathos of her own sorrow, she exclaims:—­

  ’Halla mai bista nissunu
  Tumba l’omi pe li canti?’

It appears from these words that Giammatteo’s enemies had killed him because they were jealous of his skill in singing.  Shortly after, she curses the curate of the village, a kinsman of the murderer, for refusing to toll the funeral bells; and at last, all other threads of rage and sorrow being twined and knotted into one, she gives loose to her raging thirst for blood:  ’If only I had a son, to train like a sleuth-hound, that he might track the murderer!  Oh, if I had a son!  Oh, if I had a lad!’ Her words seem to choke her, and she swoons, and remains for a short time insensible.  When the Bacchante of revenge awakes, it is with milder feelings in her heart:  ’O brother mine, Matteo! art thou sleeping?  Here I will rest with thee and weep till daybreak.’  It is rare to find in literature so crude and intense an expression of fiery hatred as these untranslatable voceri present.  The emotion is so simple and so strong that it becomes sublime by mere force, and affects us with a strange pathos when contrasted with the tender affection conveyed in such terms of endearment