He turned toward the olive-grove and began to call:
"Albadora! Albadò!"
Then, addressing his granddaughter:
"Helen, go and call her," he said.
Helen disappeared.
"Twenty-two children!" cried the old man. "Albadora gave me twenty-two children—six boys and sixteen girls. I have lost three boys and seven girls. The other nine girls are married. One of my boys went to America; another has made his home in Tocco, and works in the petroleum mines; the youngest, the one whom Candia married, is employed on the railway, and only visits us every two weeks. We are left all alone. Ah! signor, it is well said that one father supports a hundred children, and that a hundred children do not support one father."
The septuagenarian Sibyl appeared, bearing in her apron a heap of large earth-snails, a slimy and flaccid heap, from which protruded long tentacles. She was a woman of tall stature, but bent, emaciated, broken by fatigue and by frequent pregnancies, weakened by childbirths, with a small head, wrinkled like a withered apple, on a neck full of hollows and tendons. In her apron the snails stuck together, twisted about one another, glued to one another, greenish, yellowish, whitish, frothy, with colorations of pale iridescent reflections. One of them had crawled up on her hand.
The old man exclaimed:
"This gentleman wishes to rent the house from to-day on."
"God bless you!" she cried.