strength to twang a string of a chitarra, and only the tongues wagged on as their owners lay full length on stone or sand.
Amongst his listeners there was none so attentive as the wild-bird Velia. She would stand or sit with parted lips and wondering eyes, and listen to all he said without a word; mute and awed, and charmed to stillness. For that homage of attention, which she had rendered to him ever since she was old enough to know the meaning of words, old Andreino favoured her.
Santa Tarsilla did not. She was stronger, brighter, bolder, than its sickly children, and moreover it was jealous because it was always thought the woman of Savoy had hidden treasure, and of course what there was the child would have, when in due course the silent life of the Savoyard should sink into the intenser silence of the tomb.
'They say he sang too well, and that was why they burnt him,' said Andreino to her to-day, after telling her for the hundredth time of what he had seen once on the Ligurian shore, far away yonder northward, when he, who knew nothing of Adonais or Prometheus, had been called, a stout seafaring man in that time, amongst other
