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 She had been a woman of many sorrows, to whom death had been unkind, and a little son of her dead daughter's had been all that had been left to her of the children of her blood. And one day the little lad had been lost, going with his goats on the high passes above the Albegna valley, and there had been found by the dread Saturnino, asleep, and frozen, where the snows were deep, and Saturnino, who never hurt the poor, had taken him up in his arms and carried him to his own lair miles away, and there fed and tended him, and next day sent him down by one of his own men into his native village safe and sound, and with twenty broad gold pieces in his little woollen breeches.

She, being a brave woman and a holy one, no sooner found her one lost lamb thus than she took the most precious thing she had, an image of Our Lady, that had been blessed by God's Vicegerent, and slipped that and the gold coins in her pouch, and said to the mountaineer who had brought her boy, 'Lead me to your chief that I may thank him.'

The man demurred and was afraid, but finally she prevailed, and he took her back