1.

"No, my dear master," she said; "do not count upon it; I have not the strength to resist; I should die under the surgeon's knife.

It is better to allow me to die thus.

I no longer cling to life. All is at an end for me.

It is better to die before learning what has happened to my family.

And her master and mistress opposed, and said that she must take courage, that she would receive a reply to the last letters, which had been sent directly to Genoa; that she must allow the operation to be performed; that it must be done for the sake of her family.

But this suggestion of her children only aggravated her profound discouragement, which had for a long time prostrated her, with increasing anguish.

2.

At these words she burst into tears. "O my sons! my sons!" she exclaimed, wringing her hands; "perhaps they are no longer alive!

It is better that I should die also. I thank you, my good master and mistress; I thank you from my heart.

But it is better that I should die. At all events, I am certain that I shall not be cured by this operation.

Thanks for all your care, my good master and mistress. It is useless for the doctor to come again after tomorrow.

I wish to die. It is my fate to die here. I have decided.

And they began again to console her, and to repeat, "Don't say that," and to take her hand and beseech her.

3.

But she closed her eyes then in exhaustion, and fell into a doze, so that she appeared to be dead.

And her master and mistress remained there a little while, by the faint light of a taper, watching with great compassion that admirable mother, who, for the sake of saving her family, had come to die six thousand miles from her country, to die after having toiled so hard, poor woman! and she was so honest, so good, so unfortunate.

Early on the morning of the following day, Marco, bent and limping, with his bag on his back, entered the city of Tucuman, one of the youngest and most flourishing towns of the Argentine Republic.

4.

It seemed to him that he beheld again Cordova, Rosario, Buenos Ayres: there were the same straight and extremely long streets, the same low white houses, but on every hand there was a new and magnificent vegetation, a perfumed air, a marvellous light, a sky limpid and profound, such as he had never seen even in Italy.

As he advanced through the streets, he experienced once more the feverish agitation which had seized on him at Buenos Ayres; he stared at the windows and doors of all the houses; he stared at all the women who passed him, with an anxious hope that he might meet his mother; he would have liked to question every one, but did not dare to stop any one.

5.

All the people who were standing at their doors turned to gaze after the poor, tattered, dusty lad, who showed that he had come from afar.

And he was seeking, among all these people, a countenance which should inspire him with confidence, in order to direct to its owner that tremendous query, when his eyes fell upon the sign of an inn upon which was inscribed an Italian name.

Inside were a man with spectacles, and two women.

He approached the door slowly, and summoning up a resolute spirit, he inquired: "Can you tell me, signor, where the family Mequinez is?"

"The engineer Mequinez?" asked the innkeeper in his turn.

"The engineer Mequinez," replied the lad in a thread of a voice.

"The Mequinez family is not in Tucuman," replied the innkeeper.

6.

A cry of desperate pain, like that of one who has been stabbed, formed an echo to these words.

The innkeeper and the women rose, and some neighbors ran up.

"What's the matter? what ails you, my boy?" said the innkeeper, drawing him into the shop and making him sit down.

"The deuce! there's no reason for despairing! The Mequinez family is not here,“ but at a little distance off, a few hours from Tucuman.

"Where? where?" shrieked Marco, springing up like one restored to life.

"Fifteen miles from here," continued the man, "on the river, at Saladillo, in a place where a big sugar factory is being built, and a cluster of houses; Signor Mequinez's house is there;every one knows it: you can reach it in a few hours.”

7.

"I was there a month ago," said a youth, who had hastened up at the cry.

Marco stared at him with wide-open eyes, and asked him hastily, turning pale as he did so, "Did you see the servant of Signor Mequinez the Italian?"

"The Genoese? Yes; I saw her."

Marco burst into a convulsive sob, which was half a laugh and half a sob. Then, with a burst of violent resolution: "Which way am I to go? quick, the road! I shall set out instantly; show me the way!"

"But it is a day's march," they all told him, in one breath.

"You are weary; you should rest; you can set out tomorrow."

"Impossible! impossible!" replied the lad. "Tell me the way; I will not wait another instant;“ I shall set out at once, were I to die on the road!

8.

On perceiving him so inflexible, they no longer opposed him. "May God accompany you!" they said to him. "Look out for the path through the forest. A fair journey to you, little Italian!"

A man accompanied him outside of the town, pointed out to him the road, gave him some counsel, and stood still to watch him start.

At the expiration of a few minutes, the lad disappeared, limping, with his bag on his shoulders, behind the thick trees which lined the road.

That night was a dreadful one for the poor sick woman. She suffered atrocious pain, which wrung from her shrieks that were enough to burst her veins, and rendered her delirious at times.

The women waited on her. She lost her head. Her mistress ran in, from time to time, in affright.

9.

All began to fear that, even if she had decided to allow herself to be operated on, the doctor, who was not to come until the next day, would have arrived too late.

During the moments when she was not raving, however, it was evident that her most terrible torture arose not from her bodily pains, but from the thought of her distant family.

Emaciated, wasted away, with changed visage, she thrust her hands through her hair, with a gesture of desperation, and shrieked: "My God! My God! To die so far away, to die without seeing them again! My poor children, who will be left without a mother, my poor little creatures, my poor darlings!“

10.

My Marco, who is still so small! only as tall as this, and so good and affectionate! You do not know what a boy he was!

If you only knew, signora! I could not detach him from my neck when I set out; he sobbed in a way to move your pity; he sobbed; it seemed as though he knew that he would never behold his poor mother again.

Poor Marco, my poor baby! I thought that my heart would break!

Ah, if I had only died then, died while they were bidding me farewell! If I had but dropped dead!

Without a mother, my poor child, he who loved me so dearly, who needed me so much! without a mother, in misery, he will be forced to beg!

11.

He, Marco, my Marco, will stretch out his hand, famishing! O eternal God! No! I will not die!

The doctor! Call him at once I let him come, let him cut me, let him cleave my breast, let him drive me mad; but let him save my life!

I want to recover; I want to live, to depart, to flee, tomorrow, at once! The doctor! Help! help!

And the women seized her hands and soothed her, and made her calm herself little by little, and spoke to her of God and of hope.

And then she fell back again into a mortal dejection, wept with her hands clutched in her gray hair, moaned like an infant, uttering a prolonged lament, and murmuring from time to time:m"O my Genoa! My house! All that sea! O my Marco, my poor Marco! Where is he now, my poor darling?"

12.

It was midnight; and her poor Marco, after having passed many hours on the brink of a ditch, his strength exhausted, was then walking through a forest of gigantic trees, monsters of vegetation, huge boles like the pillars of a cathedral, which interlaced their enormous crests, silvered by the moon, at a wonderful height.

Vaguely, amid the half gloom, he caught glimpses of myriads of trunks of all forms, upright, inclined, contorted, crossed in strange postures of menace and of conflict; some overthrown on the earth, like towers which had fallen bodily, and covered with a dense and confused mass of vegetation, which seemed like a furious throng, disputing the ground span by span; others collected in great groups, vertical and serrated, like trophies of titanic lances, whose tips touched the clouds; a superb grandeur, a prodigious disorder of colossal forms, the most majestically terrible spectacle which vegetable nature ever presented.

13.

At times he was overwhelmed by a great stupor. But his mind instantly took flight again towards his mother.

He was worn out, with bleeding feet, alone in the middle of this formidable forest, where it was only at long intervals that he saw tiny human habitations, which at the foot of these trees seemed like the ant-hills, or some buffalo asleep beside the road; he was exhausted, but he was not conscious of his exhaustion; he was alone, and he felt no fear.

The grandeur of the forest rendered his soul grand; his nearness to his mother gave him the strength and the hardihood of a man; the memory of the ocean, of the alarms and the sufferings which he had undergone and vanquished, of the toil which he had endured, of the iron constancy which he had displayed, caused him to uplift his brow.

All his strong and noble Genoese blood flowed back to his heart in an ardent tide of joy and audacity.

14.

And a new thing took place within him; while he had, up to this time, borne in his mind an image of his mother, dimmed and paled somewhat by the two years of absence, at that moment the image grew clear; he again beheld her face, perfect and distinct, as he had not beheld it for a long time; he beheld it close to him, illuminated, speaking; he again beheld the most fleeting motions of her eyes, and of her lips, all her attitudes, all the shades of her thoughts; and urged on by these pursuing recollections, he hastened his steps; and a new affection, an unspeakable tenderness, grew in him, grew in his heart, making sweet and quiet tears to flow down his face; and as he advanced through the gloom, he spoke to her, he said to her the words which he would murmur in her ear in a little while more: "I am here, my mother; behold me here. I will never leave you again;“ we will return home together, and I will remain always beside you on board the ship, close beside you, and no one shall ever part me from you again, no one, never more, so long as I have life!

15.

And in the meantime he did not observe how the silvery light of the moon was dying away on the summits of the gigantic trees in the delicate whiteness of the dawn.

At eight o'clock on that morning, the doctor from Tucuman, a young Argentine, was already by the bedside of the sick woman, in company with an assistant, endeavoring, for the last time, to persuade her to permit herself to be operated on; and the engineer Mequinez and his wife added their warmest persuasions to those of the former.

But all was in vain. The woman, feeling her strength exhausted, had no longer any faith in the operation; she was perfectly certain that she should die under it, or that she should only survive it a few hours, after having suffered in vain pains that were more atrocious than those of which she should die in any case.

16.

The doctor lingered to tell her once more: "But the operation is a safe one; your safety is certain, provided you exercise a little courage! And your death is equally certain if you refuse!"

It was a sheer waste of words.

"No," she replied in a faint voice, "I still have courage to die; but I no longer have any to suffer uselessly. Leave me to die in peace."

The doctor desisted in discouragement. No one said anything more.

Then the woman turned her face towards her mistress, and addressed to her last prayers in a dying voice.

"Dear, good signora," she said with a great effort, sobbing, "you will send this little money and my poor effects to my family through the consul.“

17.

I hope that they may all be alive.

My heart presages well in these, my last moments.

You will do me the favor to write that I have always thought of them, that I have always toiled for them for my children that my sole grief was not to see them once more but that I died courageously with resignation blessing them; and that I recommend to my husband and to my elder son the youngest, my poor Marco that I bore him in my heart until the last moment.

And suddenly she became excited, and shrieked, as she clasped her hands: "My Marco, my baby, my baby! My life!"

But on casting her tearful eyes round her, she perceived that her mistress was no longer there; she had been secretly called away. She sought her master; he had disappeared.

18.

No one remained with her except the two nurses and the assistant.

She heard in the adjoining room the sound of hurried footsteps, a murmur of hasty and subdued voices, and repressed exclamations. The sick woman fixed her glazing eyes on the door, in expectation.

At the end of a few minutes she saw the doctor appear with an unusual expression on his face; then her mistress and master, with their countenances also altered.

All three gazed at her with a singular expression, and exchanged a few words in a low tone.

She fancied that the doctor said to her mistress, "Better let it be at once."

She did not understand.

"Josefa," said her mistress to the sick woman, in a trembling voice, "I have some good news for you. Prepare your heart for good news."

19.

The woman observed her intently.

"News," pursued the lady, with increasing agitation, "which will give you great joy."